Contaminated soil being removed after emulsion line break

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/03/2015 (3326 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nearly a hectare of farmland near the town of Waskada has been affected by an emulsion line break that dumped a large quantity of saltwater and bitumen into the soil.

The break, which was discovered on Feb. 5 by an aerial surveillance plane that had been hired by Tundra Oil & Gas to conduct inspections on their equipment, has forced the removal of dozens of truckloads of contaminated soil from the site.

“We’ve been removing contaminated soil, and we’ll definitely have to replace it,” Tundra Oil and Gas president Ken Neufeld confirmed yesterday. “We’re working with the landowner on all these issues.

“Most of the contaminated soil will be out of there by the end of this week.”

A spokesperson for the provincial government confirmed that the spill occurred on Feb. 5, when 200 cubic metres of emulsion was released approximately five miles southwest of the community.

An emulsion line is essentially a flow line between producing oil wells and an oil battery — a central facility that treats and separates the combined oil and saltwater that flows through the pipe.

“The spill fluids were recovered by a vacuum truck and disposed of at an approved waste disposal well,” the spokesperson wrote. “The site has been entered in the Manitoba Rehabilitation program and will be required to be fully rehabilitated.”

The government estimates that 25,000 tonnes of soil has already been hauled away, and that about 9,000 tonnes remained. The removal of the impacted soil is expected to be completed by March 20. Replacing the soil is expected to take somewhat longer.

The emulsion did not enter any known waterways, Neufeld said, and the government maintains that no environmentally sensitive areas were found in the spill area.

Neufeld attributed the break to corrosion in the steel pipeline, which he said came as a surprise to the company. The corroded section of pipe is part of a larger selection of oil-related assets in Manitoba’s Spearfish formation that Tundra recently purchased from a subsidiary of EOG Resources, Inc.

Last December, Tundra Oil & Gas announced the purchase of 550 oil wells that would produce about 7,000 barrels of light oil per day in the Waskada and Pierson areas. EOG Resources was formerly known as Enron Oil and Gas until the company changed its name in 1999.

The corroded section of pipe was “not particularly old,” Neufeld said, though he suggested that the line was probably oversized for what it was used.

The company has been working with the Petroleum Branch under the provincial Mineral Resources department to remediate the site and repair the corroded pipe.

Neufeld says he hopes that in studying the reasons behind the break, Tundra will be able to prevent further spills like this one.

“Full line breaks occur on occasion. But we certainly take each of them seriously and need to try and understand what the root causes were so that we can take preventative actions more broadly across our operations to minimize the likelihood of it happening again.

“A project like this is beyond just fixing and replacing the pipe. We also have to identify why that piece of pipe would have been compromised in the first place to make sure we can analyze the pipe elsewhere to make sure we don’t have similar circumstances.”

Companies are responsible for notifying the Petroleum Branch when a spill has been discovered and carrying out the spill cleanup and rehabilitation of the spill site.

A petroleum inspector then attends to the spill site to inspect the site and discuss the company’s cleanup plans.

The province has confirmed that the damaged portion of the pipeline has been replaced and the flowline has been tested and put back into operation.

» mgoerzen@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @MattGoerzen