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With NDP leader Thomas Mulcair seizing on the oil spill in Michigan to demand that the Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline be spiked, Enbridge Inc.’s incoming CEO promised to do a lot better in the future and to deliver a world class project for British Columbia. It’s the right type of message from Al Monaco, who replaces the retiring Pat Daniel this year and will have to stickhandle the project.
It’s one that has turned into a political flashpoint that seems to be propelling the opposition, anti-pipeline NDP into power in B.C. and has handed Mr. Mulcair another divisive platform to fend off the energy superpower ambitions of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
But the message needs to come with results for the Calgary-based company. Public trust in its pipelines has been depleted by its handling of the proposed $5.5-billion project across northern B.C. as well as its response to a major spill from its Line 6B in Michigan two years ago.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board found Tuesday that Enbridge officials behaved like the “Keystone Kops” in responding to the largest onshore oil spill in the U.S., a result of their failure to fix known and growing cracks due to corrosion, inadequate training of personnel, deficient integrity-management procedures, and an oil spill response plan that wasn’t good enough for a major incident.
Speaking to reporters after addressing an investment conference in Calgary Wednesday, Mr. Monaco said he is making the operational reliability of Enbridge’s pipelines his priority.
“We haven’t just been sitting around for the last two years,” he said. “We made lots of enhancements in various areas of our business, and we are going to continue to apply those learnings.”
For example, he said Enbridge has doubled annual spending, to $400-million, to improve pipeline integrity since 2010 and conducted 200 inline inspections across its entire system to highlight any problem areas.
All have been fixed or are in the process of being fixed, Mr. Monaco said, and “to this point we are quite confident in the pipeline.”
The Northern Gateway project will benefit from the improvements and will use all the major and most advanced technologies. “Our goal is for Northern Gateway to be a world-class project,” he said.
But Mr. Mulcair knows a plum when he sees one and is unlikely to be swayed — even by Mr. Monaco, who has offered to meet with him.
Mr. Mulcair is in B.C. this week to build on his party’s momentum on the West Coast.
For the rest of this article, please go to the National Post website: http://business.financialpost.com/2012/07/11/enbridge-pledges-to-apply-michigan-spill-lessons-to-northern-gateway-pipeline/