Something about the safety of oil pipelines is wrong. When a pipeline leaks crude oil into California's Santa Barbara Channel, of all places, something is very wrong.
No cause has been determined yet for the May 19 rupture of Plains All American Pipeline LP (PAA)'s Line 901, which carried heavy crude oil 10.6 miles from storage at Las Flores Canyon to a pump station at Gaviota. A 6-in. breach near the bottom of the 24-in. OD pipe released 1,700-2,500 bbl of crude, some of which migrated through a culvert into the Pacific Ocean at Refugio State Beach. Oil fouled several beaches in the area and killed birds and sea mammals.
Lines closed
The US Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) ordered Line 901 to remain closed, of course. It also restricted operation of Line 903, a 30-in. OD, 128-mile segment between Gaviota and Emidio Pump Station in Kern County with insulation and welding similar to Line 901. PAA properly closed Line 903.
An early inspection by PHMSA found that corrosion in the area of the breach had lowered thickness of the pipeline wall by much more than had been estimated by a third-party inline inspection conducted for PAA on May 5. In the area of the failure, according to PHMSA, the wall had thinned to 0.0625 in., indicating metal loss of 82%. The inline inspection had estimated the loss at 45% (See story, p. 22).
Why the discrepancy? Among possible answers: Flawed or misapplied inspection technology; malfunctioning equipment; faulty interpretation of data; misreporting, accidental or otherwise; poor communication between the vendor and operator; and-please, no!-slipshod work or outright neglect. Regulation might have been insufficiently strenuous or poorly enforced. Once all facts are at hand, the explanation probably will reflect some combination of these and other possibilities. What's certain at this point is that mishaps such as this don't just happen.
The pipeline industry, to its credit, doesn't accept the inevitability of accidents. Underlying an industry-wide program begun last year called Pipeline Safety Excellence is a goal of "zero incidents." By that standard, oil on Refugio sand manifests failure.
PAA therefore doesn't stand alone with problems in the wake of the Refugio spill. The industry legitimately can claim to move oil with comparative safety on a barrel-mile basis but can't hope the statistical record will help it with public opinion or politics when birds die on gooey beaches.
And the beach in this incident is on Santa Barbara Channel, site of the 1969 blowout-related spill that rallied environmentalism to political potency and sharpened the movement's antioil edges. It doesn't matter that the new release is one twentieth the size of its iconic predecessor. Location magnifies the political effects of any fouling by oil of Santa Barbara Channel. It matters even less that the beautiful waterway is speckled by natural seeps.
The spill couldn't have happened in a worse place. It will amplify opposition to industry work and to reliance on oil as a fuel. Yet a blow to industry's political stature is secondarily important. What's most important is that this spill shouldn't have happened. The pipeline industry says so.
Preemptive repair
An industry with a continuous need to lay pipelines and win permission to do so can't rely on promises about safety of new projects. It must demonstrate safety of pipelines laid 30, 40, or more years ago. It can do so successfully only by ensuring no unmolested pipeline develops a leak. That standard, that zero-incident standard, requires the industry to improve its methods for assessing and controlling corrosion and other elements of pipeline integrity. It also requires operators to preemptively repair old pipelines when any doubt exists about the extent of corrosion and other threats to system integrity.
Improved, more-aggressive inspection and precautionary reconstruction raise costs, to be sure. But now, more than ever, money spent on safety is the price of entry into the oil and gas business.
