User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/Trans Mountain Oil Pipeline

Trans Mountain Pipeline System (TMPL) is a pipeline system operated by Kinder Morgan Canada that transports both crude oil and refined products between Edmonton, Alberta and Burnaby, East of Vancouver, BC. Trans Mountain Pipeline is 1,147 km long and has a capacity of 300,330 oilbbl a day. It has been in operation since 1953 Kinder Morgan Canada, headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, is a business segment owned by Texas-based, Kinder Morgan, the largest energy infrastructure company in North America. Kinder Morgan owns an interest in or operates approximately 84,000 miles of pipelines and 180 terminals. In 2010 Kinder Morgan Canada transported "approximately 20 per cent of all liquid petroleum products produced in Alberta to markets in western North America through its 4000-km (2,500-mile) network of pipelines." There are 23 active pump stations located along the pipeline route that maintain a flow at a speed of approximately 8 km per hour. Terminals, located in Edmonton, Kamloops, Abbotsford and Burnaby, house "storage tanks and serve as locations for incoming feeder pipelines, and tanker loading facilities." TMPL is regulated by the NEB. The pipeline diameter is 24 inches for 827 km, 150 km of 36 inch and 170 km of 30 inch.

Terminals
Headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Kinder Morgan Canada Terminals (KMCT), a subsidiary of Kinder Morgan, operates terminals situated in Edmonton, Kamloops, Abbotsford and Burnaby where petroleum products are temporarily stored in storage tanks for incoming feeder pipes and outgoing products. Some are equipped with tanker loading facilities.

Edmonton Terminal
The Edmonton Terminal, Sherwood Park, Alberta is where the TMPL originates and has 35 storage tanks. Between 2012 and 2014 the multi-phase Edmonton Terminal Expansion Project (ETEP) added 15 operational merchant tanks and supporting infrastructure bringing the total to 35 tanks with a storage capacity of approximately 7.5 million barrels a day. The terminal has 20 incoming feeder lines from throughout Alberta. The main control centre located at the Edmonton Terminal remotely monitors all aspects of pipeline operations including leak detection with a sophisticated Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA). Edmonton facilities include terminals that provide merchant storage as well as rail terminals offering loading and delivery services for liquids products. Alberta Crude Terminal, Sherwood Park, a joint venture of Kinder Morgan and Keyera Corporation, is a crude oil rail loading facility placed in service in 2014 and served by the Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Railway networks. "It has a capacity of approximately 6,360 m³ (40,000 barrels per day (bpd)) to load and deliver crude oil products to markets and refineries across North America. There is potential for the terminal to expand its operations in the future."

Kamloops Terminal
The Kamloops Terminal, "containing two storage tanks with a shell capacity of approximately 160,000 bbl, serves as both a hub for local distribution of product shipped from Edmonton and also a receiving point for products from North Eastern B.C."

Abbotsford Terminal
Sumas Pump Station and Terminal in Abbotsford, B.C., is a pump station that routes crude oil delivered on the Trans Mountain Pipeline through to the Burnaby Terminal as well as to Washington State via Kinder Morgan Canada’s Puget Sound Pipeline System. The Sumas Terminal contains six storage tanks with a shell capacity of approximately 715,000 bbl."

Burnaby Terminal
The terminus of the TMPL mainline is the Burnaby Terminal and tank farm. In 2015, the Burnaby Storage Terminal had "13 massive tanks storing petroleum" with a shell capacity of approximately 1.685 million bbl. With the proposed expansion, Kinder Morgan would build another fourteen tanks." "The end point of the Trans Mountain Pipeline System, the terminal houses 13 storage tanks with a shell capacity of approximately 1.685 million bbl. The terminal serves as a local distribution point, for crude oil and refined products to local terminals, the local Chevron refinery, and the Westridge Marine Terminal."

"The Burnaby terminal (aka "tank farm") is the terminus of the Trans Mountain Pipeline (TMPL) mainline. It receives both crude oil and refined products (mainly from northern Alberta) for temporary storage and distribution through separate pipelines to local terminals, Chevron's Burnaby refinery and the Westridge marine terminal. The Burnaby terminal has 13 storage tanks with an overall volume of 250 000 m3 (1.6 million bbl). It contains a water treatment facility to ensure water released offsite meets all environmental requirements and a vapour recovery system to minimize the release of odours."

Port Metro Vancouver
TMPL's Westridge Marine Terminal, an oil terminal built in 1953, owned by Kinder Morgan, and located within Port Metro Vancouver in Burnaby Port Metro Vancouver, headquartered in Canada Place, legally known as Vancouver Fraser Port Authority is a non-shareholder, financially self-sufficient Crown corporation established by the Government of Canada in January 2008, pursuant to the Canada Marine Act, and accountable to the federal Minister of Transport. It is the principal authority for shipping and port-related land and sea use in the Metro Vancouver region. In 2010, it was the largest port by tonnage in Canada and the fourth largest in North America. At Port Metro Canadian Border Services Agency, the Canadian Coast Guard, Transport Canada and law enforcement are all involved in security.

Port Metro Vancouver has a significant economic impact on the Canadian economy. In 2012 the "total impact of ongoing operations at businesses related to Port Metro Vancouver across Canada" amounted to "98,800 jobs, $9.7 billion in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), $20.3 billion in economic output, $6.1 billion in wages, $67,000 average wage for direct job, vs. $44,000 average wage in Canada, and $1.3 billion per year in tax revenues."

The land owned by Port Metro Vancouver "stretches from the American border to the north shore of the Burrard Inlet—more than 345 kilometres of shoreline."

""By tonnage, Port Metro Vancouver is the fourth-largest seaport in North America, and perhaps the most politically entangled, juggling relationships with several First Nations, 28 corporate tenants running terminals and 16 municipalities, as well as countless rural landowners and environmental groups. Around the clock, enormous ships from more than 100 countries cruise in and out of the harbour, loaded down with everything from wheat to cellphones to lethal chemicals.""

- The Globe and Mail 2015

Westridge Marine Terminal
TMPL's Westridge Marine Terminal, an oil terminal built in 1953, owned by Kinder Morgan, and located within Port Metro Vancouver in Burnaby loads tankers and receives and ships jet fuel to the Vancouver International Airport through the Jet Fuel Pipeline System." The terminal "exports crude oil that arrives via the Trans Mountain pipeline" from Alberta’s oil sands. Westridge Marine Terminal can accommodate oil tankers up to the Aframax in size.

Westridge Marine Terminal operations "have become increasingly controversial with the rapid growth of the city and the rise of environmental awareness."

Oil Tankers
Currently there are about five oil tankers per month in the Burrard Inlet. If NEB accepts the proposed Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion there would be 34 oil tankers per month in in Burrard Inlet.

Examples of oil tankers that use the Westridge Marine Terminal to transport crude oil is the "New Constellation, a Marshall Islands-flagged tanker" that carries 70,000 tonnes of crude. "That’s about 25,000 times more than the estimated 2,700 litres of bunker fuel that would leak from a grain ship and foul the beaches of English Bay in April." It takes two weeks for the New Constellation to travel from Port Metro Vancouver to the South China Sea.

""By current shipping standards, the New Constellation is only a medium-sized vessel. But it’s a big ship nevertheless. Standing on end, the New Constellation would be taller than the TD tower in downtown Toronto.""

- The Globe and Mail 2015

Three $10-million tugboats escort each oil tanker from the inner harbour wharves such as Smit wharf, anchored offshore from the Westridge Marine Terminal in Burnaby, to the open sea off the south end of Vancouver Island "threading tight passages and tricky currents through the city of Vancouver at night. From the Westridge Marine terminal tankers navigate under the the Lions Gate Bridge the First and Second Narrows, Vancouver Harbour, "thread its way along designated lanes past the bulk freighters parked" in English Bay, Georgia Strait and then on to the active channels, "narrow passes and tangled geography" of the Southern Gulf Islands, Haro Strait and, finally, the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  The "super-powerful tractor tugs with omni-directional twin drives" can "spin a tug on a dime and push it sideways almost as quickly as it goes forward."

According to Don Westmoreland, captain of employer, Seaspan Marine Corporation's tugboat Raven, that provides escort services to Kinder Morgan Canada's vessels, KMC has an enviable safety record. "They’ve been shipping oil out of here for 50 years with not one incident." Captains of these tugboats are conscious of how serious their jobs are: "If anyone makes a mistake this morning, it could change the shipping industry in Canada."

As a result of the devastating Exxon Valdez spill in March 1989 when more than 40,000 tonnes of oil contaminated Alaskan coastal waters, "aggressive new maritime oil transportation laws around the world" were implemented changing the way in which oil tankers operated. Currently "the law dictates double-hulled vessels and multiple tugboat escorts and two pilots aboard every oil tanker travelling through Canadian waters."

Proposed Trans Mountain Pipeline ULC - Trans Mountain Expansion
In December 2013, Kinder Morgan filed its application to the Canadian National Energy Board (NEB) to build a second $5.4 billion dollar pipeline roughly parallel to Trans Mountain, which would nearly triple the transportation capacity from 300,000 to 850,000 barrels per day. and add one hundred new jobs. This expansion would enable the export of larger volumes of Alberta's bituminous sands oil to the US and to Asian countries. The Trans mountain pipeline has been called "controversial" " for this reason. NEB's decision is expected by January 2016.

In their Toll Application submitted to NEB, Trans Mountain Pipeline ULC operated by Kinder Morgan Canada and owned by Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, confirmed that they had "binding commercial support" for the the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline from "nine significant participants in the Canadian producing and oil marketing business": BP Canada Energy Trading Company, Canadian Oil Sands Limited, Cenovus Energy Inc., Devon Canada Corporation, Husky Energy Marketing Inc., Imperial Oil Limited, Nexen Marketing Inc., Statoil Canada Ltd. and Tesoro Canada Supply & Distribution Ltd..

Challenges to TMPL proposed extension
This project like similar pipeline projects faces opposition from civic governments, First Nations, environmentally concerned citizens, and others. Protests in November 2014 have focused on Kinder Morgan's surveying work. Similar pipeline projects include Northern Gateway from Alberta to Kitimat, BC, Keystone XL to the US south and Line 9 (Enbridge's project, from Sarnia to Montreal), all of which expand the transportation capacity of heavy crude to refineries or loading ports for export to the US or overseas.

Members of the Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations of British Columbia, Canada paddled canoes on the waters of Burrard Inlet to the Kinder Morgan Burnaby Terminal for a ceremony to protest the $5 billion expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, in North Vancouver, B.C., on September 1, 2012. In 2014 the Tsleil-Waututh filed a legal challenge with the Federal Court of Appeal in May 2014 alleging the federal government and the National Energy Board failed to adequately consult them before setting the terms of the review.

Submissions to the NEB Review
In May 2015 a report commissioned by the City of Vancouver-commissioned report "concluded a major spill from the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project would expose up to one million Metro Vancouver residents to unsafe levels of toxic vapours and cause up to $3 billion in damage to Vancouver's international brand, now considered to be worth upwards of $31 billion." In May 2015 a report commissioned by the Tseil-Waututh "concluded Kinder Morgan has underestimated the environmental and public health risks of oil spills in Burrard Inlet." A June 2015 Simon Fraser University cost-benefit study of the proposed TMPL extension by Tom Gunton, a Simon Fraser University resource and environmental planning professor, which was commissioned by the Living Oceans Society to submit to a National Energy Board-led review, argued that the "project would cost Canadians more than $6.4 billion during its first 30 years of operation." Kinder Morgan argued that the project would "provide $45 billion in increased revenues to producers over 20 years and $14.7 billion in additional revenue for government."

Addressing Safety Concerns
Kinder Morgan is putting in place measures to protect against any threat of oil spills caused by its Trans Mountain pipeline expansion such as new marine and storage terminals in Burnaby, B.C. and "new spill-response bases" which would be located at ports in Delta, Nanaimo, Sidney, Sooke and Ucluelet.

Western Canada Marine Response Corp
Western Canada Marine Response Corp., fifty percent owned by Kinder Morgan, is the agency responsible for spill cleanup. With their proposed new $100-million dollar investments in new equipment such as five new bases along the tanker route, they will "exceed all the requirements set by Transport Canada." Trans Mountain potential shippers would be charged an extra fee to cover the $100-million investment. Senior director of marine development Michael Davies, said "new rules would require tugs to stay with vessels for greater distances and pilots to remain on board longer."

The existing and proposed pipelines ship diluted bitumen through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, an extremely sensitive environmental region. The tankers have to pass through a very narrow channel of shallow water to reach the open sea, making the project controversial and strongly opposed by some Canadians and Americans, for reasons similar to the opposition to Keystone XL, Line 9, and Northern Gateway and offshore deep ocean oil drilling.

A study by Simon Fraser University claims that Kinder Morgan has overestimated the economic benefits of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. 

Burrard Inlet
The proposed Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion "would increase the number of tankers in Burrard Inlet to 34 per month from five."