In an article in today's Globe and Mail, Dr. Gail Fraser says the discrepancies show a failure by the Board to follow up on the mandatory environmental assessments to ensure the forecasts were realistic.
Her study shows that Husky Energy's White Rose development has had four spills of between one and 50 barrels (up to about 7,500 litres) in volume since opening five years ago; but in White Rose's predevelopment environmental assessment, it forecast just 2.38 such spills over the entire history of the project - at least 15 years. Petro-Canada's Terra Nova project, forecast 5.3 spills of the same size and has reported at least 34 since 1999.
The Canada-Newfoundland Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board is disputing the numbers. They say that the environmental assessment numbers referred to by Fraser deal with spills from the platforms only, while "[spills] from tanker loading and production operations are assessed separately and have their own probabilities."The study was published yesterday in the Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management in association with the Alder Institute, a Newfoundland non-profit ecology collective.
Makes you wonder what will happen when the government becomes a "player" in the oil field.
ReplyDeleteWho'll report the spills then?
The puffins, I s'pose.