CANADIAN OILPATCH / PIPELINE NEWS
The last pipe
Saturday 9 November 1996
Six construction crews, from Alberta to Wyoming, are sealing the final joints this month along the 1,255-kilometre Express Pipeline, Canada's first major oil export line built in 40 years.
The completion of Express concludes a three-year struggle by Alberta Energy Co. and its most-recent partner, TransCanada PipeLines Ltd., to reach new and more distant markets for Canadian oil by April 1, 1997.
The $535-million Express Pipeline, when linked to a refurbished Platte Pipeline to Wood River, Ill., will link the heart of Alberta oil production to huge mid-western refineries and the U.S. Rocky Mountain states.
First conceived in 1993, AEC had to take two runs at signing up enough shippers to make the 172,000 barrel-a-day line a reality. If oil sells for $20 a barrel, a full Express will pump $3.4 million a day, or $1.2 billion a year into Canada. If royalties average 15 per cent, another $180 million will flow to provincial coffers each year.
Express is Canada's first major industrial project to be reviewed by a joint panel of the National Energy Board and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.
Tough rules were defined for its construction. And pipeliners, proud of their drive to lay steel in the ground with speed and precision, are having to cool their heels for where the deer and the antelope play.
On the south bank of the Red Deer River, Harvey Glendening barks commands to his three-member bending team.
"Six and seven. One fifteen, OB," Glendening yells over the prairie wind to Bill Fletcher, who uses a black magic marker to detail bending instructions on the light green epoxy jacket that coats the steel tube.
Glendening started engineering Express' twists and curves at the 49th parallel.
"I've been waiting to see this river for 235 kilometres. It's been a battle."
Glendening must keep his lead crew moving quick enough so they are not caught by the series of gangs assembling Express behind them.
Building pipelines across the prairie appears relatively simple. Dig a trench, weld the pieces, toss it in and backfill the dirt.
But Express has been under greater scrutiny from the environmental community than predecessor pipelines.
It is easier and cheaper for graders and dozers to just cut a straight right-of-way, plowing through all terrain, muddying up rivers, shaving away many of the smaller ribs and crevices that texture the prairie. Every bend takes more work, and will require more power to pump the oil south.
But to retain the ground's original shape, the pipe is bent time and time again to hug Mother Earth's wrinkles.
"This is quite soft pipe and it ropes quite a bit. It will bend itself, once it's all welded together," says Glendening, unless he reads the ground incorrectly or misses one of the thousands of required bends.
"It's my job to be accurate and on the money. If you make a mistake down the line it's very costly" forcing the builders to cut the steel string and install the properly shaped piece.
Environmental concerns are in the face of every worker, on both sides of the border.
About 50 kilometres northwest of Box Elder, Mont., Oklahoma pipeliner Jack Freeman is watching his crew of boom cat operators snake one of five U.S.-built sections into a two-metre deep trench.
The pipe has been sitting on plastic sheets the size of garbage bags. When the string is lifted to be laid in ditch, a couple of laborers chase windblown plastic sheets to stuff them in large garbage bags.
"The place to put the damn stuff would be in the bottom of the ditch but the environmentalists would have nine kinds of kittens. What it would hurt, I don't know," says Freeman, a 40-year pipeline veteran who scoffs at some of the intensity of the environmental protection that drives up costs.
Building pipelines in the 1990s requires the re-education of crews who were raised on welding and laying steel fast and fierce.
"If the laborers wasn't running and hooked up and getting it, they would just run them off right there on the spot and get another one. They didn't mess with you not one bit," says Danny Moore, a safety inspector from Monticello, Ark.
"You can't even run out there right now. It's a safety issue."
To prevent problems, each worker must takes safety and environmental training.
There have been no serious accidents to date. A couple of horses were killed when a U.S. survey crew plowed into a stray herd lost in thick fog. In Canada, a runaway grass fire burned up 150 acres before a rush of workers quashed the flames.
In a training video, Express's head of environmental protection outlines a list of rules and regulations that won't be tolerated. Just driving outside the 27-metre right of way could result in a firing.
Workers are handed photographs of 42 plants and animals that require protection. In one of the driest corners of the continent, topsoil conservation is a high priority.
"Avoid unnecessary wheel spin" on trucks. "The topsoil must be in neat piles or windrows. Yes, neatness counts," environmental official Mike Hauser emphasizes in the video.
Steel dozers are fitted with flexible plastic blades that wear out faster, but cause less soil and plant damage. Where possible, rivers and creeks are crossed by drilling under the river bed.
Despite the added care, some environmental groups are not giving up on legal challenges.
The Rocky Mountain Ecosystem Coalition is asking the Supreme Court of Canada to order the Federal Court of Canada to review the environmental approval granted Express by the federal regulators. RMEC's drive is part of a long-running campaign to recognize the cumulative effect of such pipelines, not only on the ground where they sit, but in the wells drilled in remote locations to fill them with oil.
Express is Canada's newest piece in an expanding roster of export pipes.
The world's longest oil pipeline, Interprovincial Pipe Line Inc., is spending about $710 million between now and 1998 to expand its system in two phases, adding 240,000 barrels a day of shipping capacity to Chicago and Wood River.
IPL also announced Friday the completion of an $11 million expansion of existing lines in Saskatchewan and North Dakota that will move another 50,000 barrels a day to the U.S.
To fill the lines, every major Canadian oil company has ambitious projects in the works over the next few years. |
