Roger 97

Hey, those are pretty complicated instructions for a guy who still uses a T-square!

|;-)

@ Roger Kemble.

#97 Of course! *bonks own forehead with hand* I have done that in the past. Duh. As with many things in life, the best, most ‘elegant’ solutions are often the easiest ones.

As for “deserves all he gets”, that’s pretty funny, on several different levels.

I propose that you and MB both attend the next ‘FABula’ beer fest.

I’d like ta size both ye boyz up, with me gimlet eye…arghhhh.

PS @Roger Kemble

‘SS deserves all he gets . . . as the lady said “go live in the Amazon!’

That, my dear, would indeed be the sound of 1,000 monkeys, banging away on 1,000 typewriters…shurely.

Hi Glissy!
Thought I’d wait until this thread died down a little before responding. You don’t have to worry – I haven’t gone over to the dark side – but I’ve never left my own values and concern for the natural world around us has always been part of my life.

In Frances’s latest article on this in today’s Globe, a Port official states tankers are already required to have insurance.

As far as I can tell, here is the relevant part of the Canada Shipping Act:

Discharges of Oil
Vessels — requirements

167. (1) Subject to subsection (2), every prescribed vessel or vessel of a prescribed class shall

*

(a) have an arrangement with a response organization in respect of a quantity of oil that is at least equal to the total amount of oil that the vessel carries, both as cargo and as fuel, to a prescribed maximum quantity, and in respect of waters where the vessel navigates or engages in a marine activity; and
*

(b) have on board a declaration, in the form specified by the Minister, that
o

(i) identifies the name and address of the vessel’s insurer or, in the case of a subscription policy, the name and address of the lead insurer who provides pollution insurance coverage in respect of the vessel,
o

(ii) confirms that the arrangement has been made, and
o

(iii) identifies every person who is authorized to implement the arrangement.

Notice what’s missing? A required $$$ for said insurance, perhaps?

While there is a requirement to have an agreement with a “response organization” to handle a spill up to a “prescribed maximum quantity” what happens if, you know, the spill exceeds the “prescribed maximum quantity”.

For example, if one tanker hits another and both leak. How big a spill can the current response organizations in the Lower Mainland handle?

And nothing is mentioned about the pipeline end of this.

Seems all a bit loosey-goosey to me.

I suddenly remembered my friend in the UK is “in the biz”

Their response to my query for info:

All oil tanker owners are required to carry liability insurance to cover the costs consequent to a spill of oil from the vessel. The international legislation driving this is outlined here:

http://www.itopf.com/spill-compensation/clc-fund-convention/

More detail on the specifics of the compensatory/liability funds can be garnered here:

http://www.iopcfund.org/FAQs.htm

As to the level of cover required, IIRR the international agreements under which the ITOPF provisions apply may be supplemented by additional national requirements. However, I wouldn’t like to provide any examples now as my memory is a tad rough in this area (haven’t worked tanker pollution since stopping doing the contingency planning for the Hound Point offloading terminal in the Firth of Forth).

In a nutshell then, yes – oil tankers are required to carry pollution liability insurance. Of course, like all insurance contracts, when time comes for payout the insurers will try to minimise the loss by apportioning proportionate blame or mitigation elsewhere (e.g. the shipyard that built the tanker).

@spartikus // May 1, 2012 at 3:01 pm #109

Browse the graphic below for over 10,000 tonne spills [ 1 short ton (2000 lbs) = 0.90718 tonne or the metric ton which is 1000 kilo. ]

Diesel fuel oil 20 to 60 at 15ºC has a density of 0.820 to 0.950 kg/L
A good average value might be Diesel oil 40 at 15ºC with a density of 0.850 kg/L
1 metric ton = 1000 kg. 1000 kg / 0.850 kg/L = 1176.47 liters of diesel.
1000 litres is a cube 1 metre per side, 1.3 cubic yards.
Aha, now spread it thin and you get an enormous area and a change in surface tension and water chemistry.

Chart and Data
The Largest Oil Spills in History, 1901 to Present
http://chartsbin.com/view/mgz

Somewhat hidden on first view is their “References and Data Table” which you can see as a below-image button that expands the data table.
Note the usual sources IOPTF, Cedre.fr etc. so you could update the charte.

Attempts to assuage liabilty fears were made by Bruce Turnbull in the 4 part, multi-article Black Press series reference far above [ // Apr 24, 2012 at 4:19 pm #10 ]

Not so, says Bruce Turnbull of Western Canada Marine Response Corporation (WCMRC), formerly known as Burrard Clean.

All such vessels which sail into Canadian waters must have an arrangement with a spill response organization which, on the west coast, is WCMRC. The tankers, which must be double-hulled, are brought into Vancouver harbour by local pilots who know about any hazards that need to be avoided.

If there is a spill, and the tanker’s owner walks away, the ship would be seized and WCMRC would tap in to the insurance that tanker companies are required to purchase in advance, Canada’s Ship-source Oil Pollution Fund, Turnbull said. If that insurance runs out, a similar international fund is used.

“The taxpayer is not on the hook.”

WCMRC, which is primarily funded by four major oil companies (Imperial Oil, Shell Canada, Chevron and Suncor) and pipeline operator Kinder Morgan, responds to an average 20 spills a year, he said. They range from small gasoline spills from power boats and incidents involving canola oil, to the 100,000-litre spill resulting from the 2007 rupture of Kinder Morgan’s pipeline in North Burnaby, the largest Canadian incident it has responded to on the west coast.

As for how much oil is typically recovered, Turnbull said it’s not 100 per cent, due to a number of variables including evaporation. “Recovery is only part of an overall strategy. Protection and mitigation of damage to resources is a priority.”

Generally, the response involves containing spills with booms and collecting the oil using skimmers. If the responsible party requests a wildlife rescue response, as Kinder Morgan did in 2007, WCMRC may manage it or hire a professional organization to work within the response command structure

See more in the Black Press empire series in many community (weekly) papers and the various postiions of animals and fish conservation and the mop swabbers at:
http://www.burnabynewsleader.com/news/147207745.html
and look at the bottom of the article for the whole series.

OIL & WATER SERIES INDEX
A Black Press series exploring the logistics, risks and politics of Kinder Morgan’s proposed oil pipeline expansion.
PART 1:
How safe are oil tankers travelling southern B.C. waters?
Notable accidents involving oil
Boaters concerned about more oil tanker traffic coming to Burrard Inlet
Airlines pursue Richmond pipeline to satisfy growth
PART 2:
What happens if there’s an oil spill in B.C.?
‘People of the Inlet’ oppose Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion
PART 3:
Is B.C. destined to be Alberta’s oil superport?
Burnaby company in the business of disaster response

Stupid Season @ #104

A simple thank you will be sufficient!

^ IMO you are dismissing the benefits out of hand. How many jobs? at what skill level and pay rate? What about support industries?

WRT risks, you say there is no acceptible risk level, when there clearly is. Otherwise the kinder Morgan terminal would have been shut down a long time ago. One might even consider shuttering the pipeline, it was buit along the fraser river, obviously important to all of BC and especially to Metro Vancouver.

If places that share similar values to the environment to vancouver, like rotterdam, can ship oil safely to the benefit of the local economy, I don’t see why we can’t.

Paul T. 111

Weren’t you that Second Officer who woke up, jumped ship, swam to shore and assumed another identity after drinking with the captain a couple of hours before the Exxon Valdez FACT</p< hit Bligh Reef which was FACT indelibly recorded on all the charts in what became FACT one of the most egregious cases of FACT human error in recent history?

Weren’t you the Exxon PR chief that referred to the massive public backlash as “a bunch of NIMBYs who want to shut down industry”?

If you’re capable of actually saying So this is not about the environment vs. the economy. If we wanted to save the environment, we’d just shut the port down. But no one wants to do that then the above conjecture isn’t that far off.

Paul, no one wants to shut the Port down. But on the other hand no one — least of all you — has spelled out how to balance the risks and benefits of ramping up the Port oil exports of crude with the largest ships the Port will ever see, and that will FACT require dredging Second Narrows and FACT have to slip through First Narrows at high slack tide with all other ship traffic forced to shut down throughout Burrard Inlet during the transit.

@MB @120, In the frances bula article linked by bill lee, the ships will be the same oil transports that are in use today (‘aframax’ according to the article).

@ Mezzz 120

In the frances bula article linked by bill lee, the ships will be the same oil transports that are in use today

Then why do they have to blast / dredge Second Narrows if not for wider ships with deeper draughts when loaded?

@agustin 125

IMO my point re: acceptible risk levels still stands. Even you seem to agree:

“The longer we have oil tankers around, the more the probability of a spill approaches 100%. The question is not if there will be an oil spill, but when
…..
But unless we’re talking about hundreds of full time jobs in Vancouver , I don’t see how it would outweigh the costs.”

WRT to rotterdam, here si alink that i got in 5 seconds from google:

http://www.portofrotterdam.com/en/Business/liquid-bulk/Pages/refining-pipelines.aspx

I don’t have the time to search out further stats on rotterdam, other than to say that both vancouver and rotterdam strive to be efficient ports, care about their local economy and local environment, yet rotterdam handles a lot of oil traffic without headline incident.
——
“Furthermore you also have to bring up examples where things have not gone well.”

that’s the thing – it’s easy to get a viceral response to a bad spill, but what is the actual data?

i don’t know off-hand events in the local area where things have not gone well. There was the spill resulting from sloppy excavating by (city of burnaby?) work crews, and the recent fire at cherry point refinery. But don’t take my word for it.

@ Mezz re: Rotterdam vs. Vancouver.

You got me curious, so I took a coffee break and flew in via Google Earth.

Rotterdam lies about 30 km inland from the North Sea at the confluence of the Rotte and Nieuwe Mass Rivers. This part of the Netherlands has been totally re-engineered. A new canal called the New Waterway was carved all the way to the North Sea, and it is 1,300 m wide (shore to shore) at the mouth. It is divided in two longitudinaly with a breakwater.

The south shore is chock-a-block with huge oil terminals carved out of the soft alluvial soils, starting with the new Mausvlakte I and II right at the North Sea and extending about 25 km inland to Pernis. The breakwater appears to separate the supertanker traffic on the south shore from the rest of the marine traffic, and the ships have a minimuim of 500 m wide, clear shipping lanes with direct access to the sea.

Vancouver, on the other hand, has the 440m wide First Narrows (shore to shore — the shipping lanes which all Burrard inlet traffic must squeeze are a lot narrower) and is bounded by hard rock.

The Second Narrows is about 320m wide (shore to shore) with a very tight squeeze of around 160m between the railroad bridge abutments. Allowing for appropriate clearances, the shipping lane would be only about 70-80m wide under the bridge. All oil tanker traffic must pass through Second Narrows.

Unlike Rotterdam, there is no separation between supertankers and other marine traffic, therein requiring the shut down of all Port traffic when a supertanker is transiting through Burrard Inlet.

Moreover, Rotterdam supertanker traffic has direct access to the open sea, whereas the BC coast presents many more navigational obstacles and twisting shipping lanes beyond Vancouver (and Kitimat) for at least 100 km before it enters the open sea.

Impossible? No.

But Rotterdam and Vancouver are night and day when it comes to minimizing the risk of expanded oil exports and potentially catastrophic spills as seen from the huge differences in the physical characteristics between these ports, let alone years of experience managing that risk.

And Vancouver Harbour has one of the most polluted bottoms in Canada. Hamilton is worse.
And they want to disturb it in any way by dredging (to where would the deposits be sent), and by blasting?

Meanwhile the Surrey Leader newspaper says in a headline: Metro’s inland cities not rushing to judge oil pipeline http://www.surreyleader.com/news/149714335.html Updated: May 01, 2012 12:52 PM
….”Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts, who chairs Metro Vancouver’s port cities committee, said it’s too early to pass judgment because Kinder Morgan is still far away from formally filing an application to the National Energy Board, a move expected after as much as two years of company-led public consultations.
“It’s really important to ensure we have all of the information,” she said.
“We want to know what emergency response measures are in place. We want to know what the environmental measures will be and any other impacts we need to have brought forward to us.”

and
“Abbotsford Mayor Bruce Banman said his city needs to work with Kinder Morgan to ensure there’s proper consultation on local concerns, and noted his city stands to receive an extra $1 million or more in property tax each year for the expanded pipeline corridor.”

Expanded corridor? [ See map on Surrey Leader page http://raven.b-it.ca/portals/uploads/surrey/.DIR288/Map-KMTransMountainpipelineROW-LowerMainland-7web.jpg%5D
“Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain oil pipeline is shown in green. The proposed twin pipeline might not necessarily follow the exact same right-of-way.”

Hello? They want 100 metre right of way (300 Druid feet), about a city block wide path!!
The current path is aobut 10 metres, a house-lot wide, not a city block wide.
Will this mean compulsory expropriation, crossing under farms (they don’t tunnel, it is Cambie street all over again!!!)

Time for a different harbour coming out of Toba or Bute Inlets, if not Rivers inlet and other fjords along the coast.
I still say that the oil is going to go down the coast to the U.S. not to Asia. Kinder Morgan doesn’t have terminals in Asia.

There are thousands of ships every year using the inlet and I’m wondering if someone could point to any major accidents.The way people are talking you would think the bottom must be littered with wrecks,you make it sound like its bumper cars out there. I would like to see some statistics on all these previous catastrophes that must have already taken place and if there isn’t any why would we assume that there will be in the future.

There’s also hamburg. a much busier port than vancouver handling ++oil. It’s ~ 100 km upstream on the elbe river.

maximum draught regardless of tides = 12.8 meters; high tide = 15 metres. (1)

Compared to vancouver @ 2nd narrows

maximum draught regardless of tides = 11.9 meters; high tide = 12.5 metres. (2)

i’m no sailor, but these seem similar, and hamburg handles a lot more oil. I’d worry if vancouver had to handle more than 1 aframax tanker a day, but i don’t see why we can’t move up from 2-3 ships per week.

http://www.hafen-hamburg.de/en/content/elbe-river

http://www.portmetrovancouver.com/libraries/port_users_marine_operations/harbour_manual.sflb.ashx

page 32

@Roger Kemble // May 2, 2012 at 12:52 pm #135

Yes, I agree.
I was just suggesting that the Vancouver harbour, created by the Railways (Railroads) coming down the Fraser Canyon to the sea in the 19th century, the inner harbour really doesn’t fit the urban area anymore.
(Few remember when freight came ashore on Kitsilano beaches)

Maybe it is time for a new freight, bulk, container, break-bulk harbour closer to Asia by going north to other places.
And yes, a break is inevitable, along the land or the sea.

Transportation Safety Board annual report and by the months http://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/stats/pipeline/prelim-2011/index.asp
“A total of 5 pipeline accidents”…”In 2011, 165 pipeline incidents were reported…”
[ See left column for more ]

And yes, Mr. Rafe Mair was also right on the run-of-the-river power debacle and those should be stopped too in their poor design. At least we can close the physical plant in many cases.

We don’t care about our water, either drinking water, the misuse of it as primary water, nor the oceans we shit into.

@ Mezz 127

i don’t know off-hand events in the local area where things have not gone well. There was the spill resulting from sloppy excavating by (city of burnaby?) work crews…

The multiple lawsuits that erupted (pardon the pun) from this gusher (200,000+ litres) focused on the key fact that Kinder Morgan did not have accurate “as built” drawings indicating the exact location of the old pipe, not was there an adequate effort to locate the exact location with utility-locating sensors. They were about 2m off. This was published by various media.

I am unable to locate the lawsuit settlement terms on line (probably under wraps), but have heard a runour that Kinder Morgan and possibly Burnaby had to assume the majority of liability on the accident.

I also know that KM has really tightened up their control over their pipeline easements and now require a permit for any work within 30m.

@ mezzanine – I appreciate your approach: this is policy to be weighed out carefully, and probably best done over a pint.

For now we’ll agree to disagree 🙂

I’d be interested to get your thoughts on the other cost I listed:

– Not turning the tide (pun somewhat intended) on fossil fuel use. There is already more oil being produced and exported every day than should be. No need to produce and export more.

As well, on the alternative of refining the product in situ (or thereabouts) and shipping finished products east to the rest of Canada instead of overseas. (This suggestion was also raised recently by the apparently-cranky former head of the Bank of Canada, David Dodge.)

IMHO we need to have a frank, open discussion in this country on energy policy. That means what we do with oil and gas but also electricity and energy efficiency. I think we’re missing out on huge potential to become a lot less damaging on the environment while at the same time becoming the continent’s (and, to a lesser extent, the world’s) power supplier. To me, the Kinder Morgan expansion is 20th-century thinking.

and now…..

Kinder Morgan reduces size of Vancouver-Alberta Trans Mountain expansion
By Jeffrey Jones, Reuters May 23, 2012
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Kinder+reduces+size+Vancouver+Alberta+Trans+Mountain+expansion/6667481/story.html

CALGARY – Kinder Morgan Energy Partners has reduced the size of a planned expansion of its pipeline to the Pacific Coast after fewer shippers than expected signed 20-year contracts that would allow surging Canadian oil supplies to be shipped to Asia, the company said on Wednesday.
Kinder Morgan now plans a $4.1 billion expansion of its Trans Mountain pipeline to the Vancouver area from Alberta, increasing capacity to 750,000 barrels a day from 300,000. That is down from last month’s estimate of 850,000.
It had expected enough contracts to support a $5 billion project with crude production from the Alberta oil sands forecast to more than double over the next decade. But a few potential shippers it thought would sign onto the lengthy obligations had failed to obtain their boards’ approvals by the deadline, prompting the reduction, Kinder Morgan said.
The Trans Mountain expansion is the second multibillion-dollar proposal aimed at opening up lucrative new markets in Asia for Canadian oil producers, now captive to U.S. customers amid a glut that has led to bargain-basement price discounts.
The first, Enbridge Inc’s $5.5 billion Northern Gateway pipeline to Kitimat, British Columbia, from Alberta, is the subject of public hearings that began in January.
Both projects face opposition from environmental groups and some native communities in British Columbia. Vancouver city council has also come out against the Kinder expansion, which would increase… [ more ]