National Energy Board under fire for approved changes coming to Line 9
Posted Mar 7, 2014 01:51:11 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The National Energy Board is coming under fire for the approved changes coming to Line 9.
The board gave engery giant Enbridge approval Thursday to reverse the flow of oil in Line 9 and to increase the amount of oil.
Line 9 currently runs from Sarnia to Montreal, and the pipe line travels through the southern edge of Waterloo Region.
Adam Scott, Environmental Defence’s Program Manager for Climate and Energy tells 570’s Gary Doyle show this pipeline was designed in 1975 to carry 240,000 barrels of light oil. That’ll now be increased to 300,000 barrels of heavy tar sand oil, “It’s an old beat up pipe line, it’s been around for 38 years. These things do fall apart over time. Enbridge has a track record of big spills, they had the huge Kalamazoo spill, 3 million litres into the Kalamazoo river in 2010, that pipeline was nearly identical to this one.”
“We’ve already seen studies, I mean it crosses every single river that flows into Lake Ontario, as well as the St. Lawrence river and it’s quite close to the lake, so there’s already spill modelling that shows a spill into any one of those rivers could end up in Lake Ontario and it could affect the drinking water supplies of millions of people.”
In addition to the reversed flow, the pipeline will now carry a heavy tar sand oil, as opposed to the light oil it currently carries which Scott says is very dangerous, “There’s carcinogens in them. And also the heavier oil is harder to clean up, so you end up in a situation where we could have persistent toxic chemicals in the environment for years if there was a spill. The long term damage would be massive, there’d be big liabilities for local municipalities and governments that wouldn’t be covered by the company.”
