“British Columbia would get only eight per cent of the pipeline revenue while assuming 100 per cent of the marine risk for the port terminal and tanker traffic on the West Coast, and 58 per cent of the land-based risk for the pipeline.” - CBC.
Over the last ten years, Enbridge's US pipelines have spilled 17 times, averaging 100,000 gallons spilled. In Canada, Enbridge's spills have averaged 475,500 gallons apiece since 1992, according to Pembina.
In response to such criticism, Enbirdge published the following statement: “on average, for every barrel of oil shipped 1,000 miles, less than one teaspoon is lost from a liquid pipeline.”
If we were to extrapolate that to the dimensions of the pipeline route on the ground in BC (404 miles, 191,625,000 barrels/ year,. 0.49 ml in a teaspoon), it would seem that Enbridge here appears to admit that they expect to leak some 16 million gallons a year into BC landscapes.
So my question was what would a spill mean to British Columbians? We hear it all the time, its not if, its when, but then so what?
I decided to use multi criteria evaluation (MCE) to look at the impacts a potential spill would have on wild salmon populations in BC.
A similar study from professors at the University of Victoria and the University of Calgary (Nelson et. all) looked at the impacts a potential oil spill would have upon protected parks in BC. I am not an ecologist, nor a conservationist, but rather an environmental economist, a sustainable development studies student. My academic perspective has led me to seek out development projects which advance both environmental and economic progress. So I looked at both economic and ecological value of salmon populations.
I discuss both below:
Benefit Cost Analysis is one method for weighing the costs and benefits of a project, economically, for internalizing externalities, or things which are not typically accounted for in economic analysis (Chappel). Costing ecological, environmental assets is something the field is not in complete agreement upon. Instead two alternatives have been commonly used. The first is payment for ecosystem services, a field which attempts to use bargaining between stewards and beneficiaries of a natural resource (a common waterbody for example) to decide upon the appropriate value of environmental projects. The second is the use of proxis, secondary assets which are more easily evaluated and serve as a stand in for the primary asset which you're interested in. The David Suzuki Foundation, partnering with the Sierra Club of BC, recently published a report which used the proxi of fisheries employment on BC's Northern Coast to demonstrate the value of fish stocks in these areas.
I chose to use an estimated value of individual salmon species' landed values (revenues from caught wild salmon, via the BC Ministry of Agriculture) of stocks dependent upon particular watersheds, as a proxi for the value of the economic benefit of salmon in these watersheds. I did not attempt to project the economic benefit of a pipeline with an expected spill in each of these watersheds as traditional benefit cost analysis would require. I did not feel that such analysis would fit into the temporal scope of the project due, nor was I interested in projecting expected employment benefits of spill cleanup, or such things. I recognize this represents a bias in the study, but a bias I was willing to take.
I chose to look at salmon values for two primary reasons:
First: salmon are a significant concern. The BC Environmental Assessment office has only denied two projects in its 162 project history (CBC). One was for impacts to first nations water supplies and the second was for threats to the salmon populations in the Skeena River, just north of the Enbridge pipeline route. First nations water is a complex issue, in large part because its position in environmental assessment legislation is unclear and will likely face years of litigation (Hoberg). Salmon population data was more accessible.
Second: land based spills appear simpler to map than oceanic spills. I could not find geographic data on expected spill dispersions and am not qualified to model such data and so looked at watersheds. Further the David Suziki report just mentioned, already provided proxi based economic data for this region. It should be noted that this report did have a few limitations, in that it limited it analysis to municipalities rather than economic regions likely due to limitations in data.
Another possible proxi could've been agricultural revenues in these watersheds. Obama rejected the Keystone XL pipeline initially for this rationale. However, the connection between an oil spill into aquatic environments, damaged soil, and declines in yield was not one I was prepared to take.
In multi-criteria analysis I used the legnth of the pipeline in each watershed as a proxi for the probability of a spill in each region, as the UVIC/U of Calgary study did.
Finally I additionally presented a simple ecological index in the multi criteria analysis to portray a more holistic study, discussed further in the methodology section..
I hope you enjoy.