(Daily Oil Bulletin) Calgary – Husky Energy Inc. recently received approval to repair a section of its Saskatchewan Gathering System which ruptured a year ago, spilling heavy oil and diluent into the North Saskatchewan River, the company’s chief executive said July 21.
“We have a little more work to do with all the authorities before we are all comfortable — ourselves included — that we want to restart it,” Rob Peabody, chief executive officer, said in a conference call to discuss second quarter 2017 results.
About 40 per cent of the 1,400 bbls that leaked from the pipeline in the July 20, 2016 incident ended up in the river, affecting the water supply of First Nations and other communities downstream from the spill.
As of the end of 2016, the Husky Midstream Limited Partnership, the owner of the pipeline, had incurred a total cost for the pipeline spill of about $107 million, which largely accounts for all the costs, said Rob Symonds, Husky’s chief operating officer.
Peabody said the question is what Husky and the industry as a whole learned in order to respond even faster to an anomaly in the pipeline operation. “The short answer is, as my mother used to tell me, learn from your mistakes and don’t do it again and make sure that other people also learn from your mistakes if possible so everybody cannot do it again.”
Husky and other groups have been doing extensive investigations and “we are trying to learn from everything that everybody is doing here,” he said.
“We went through a very significant investigation of all the incidents that occurred and we transferred the learnings particularly on slope stability to all of our operations and have shared them,” added Symonds.
Earlier this year, the Saskatchewan Ministry of the Economy released the results of its investigation into the spill. It concluded that the cause of the pipeline break was due to mechanical cracking in a buckle in the pipeline which was caused by ground movement on the slope which occurred over many years and was not a sudden, one-time event.
“There’s a lot of changes that are going to take place there,” including changes to design and to monitoring equipment,” said Peabody.
For the repairs to the pipeline, Husky has added a number of enhancements, particularly on monitoring movement on the line, including putting fibre optics on the pipeline and inclinometers to measure the ground to “make sure we are on top of ground movement,” said Symonds. “We monitor it because ground movement is an unpredictable thing and we are transferring that learning everywhere.”
The repaired pipeline also will have higher grades of steel and a thicker walled pipe.
“What’s interesting is that this wasn’t a pipeline without monitoring equipment,” said Peabody. “This actually had two leak detection systems on it already.”
It’s not that the leak detectors failed but that there wasn’t an unambiguous message coming from the system, he said. “Pipeline systems are dynamic and things are happening in them all the time so if you are looking at pressure and flow data it’s always fluctuating to some degree so that any leak detection system is trying to find anomalies in a fluctuating and dynamic system.”
The additional monitoring systems are to focus more locally on high risk areas so that there is a better chance of getting an immediate indication of a leak, according to Peabody.
“We certainly realize that spill had an impact on communities and the First Nations downstream and we are certainly grateful for the support and co-operation we received,” he said. “We had more than 1,000 people involved in the cleanup effort including more than 450 First Nations members who did an outstanding job.”
While Husky certainly doesn’t want to have another such incident, “there was a silver lining in this in that it really did allow us to build closer relationships with both the community and First Nations,” according to Symonds.
