Every week, a barge laden with a crude oil called dilbit makes the journey from Vancouver, B.C., to Tacoma, winding its way through the passages of the San Juan Islands to southern Puget Sound. If the dilbit aboard spills into water, it will sink to the bottom, attaching to sediment. This makes it much harder to clean up than other oil spills.
That weekly trip of dilbit — bitumen diluted with natural-gas condensates containing naphtha — through Washington's ecologically sensitive Salish Sea soon will happen much more frequently, as often as every day.
With the expected expansion in capacity of Canada’s Trans Mountain pipeline from Alberta, oil vessel traffic through the Salish Sea is expected to increase seven-fold, according to a vessel traffic study by two university researchers. And Washington, environmentalists and other concerned citizens say, is ill-prepared to handle the added risks.
All large oil tankers plying the waters of Puget Sound are required to use tug escorts. But smaller vessels, such as articulated barges, which are newer and come outfitted with more safety features, are not — even though they can carry as much oil as small tankers and are run by a smaller crew. They too will be used more frequently.
Today in Olympia the House Finance Committee voted in favor of a measure to require tug escorts for articulated tug barges and other smaller vessels between 5,000 and 40,000 deadweight tons out of committee. HB 1611 aims to address some shortcomings in the state’s oil spill prevention program. It would improve safety requirements for water transport, including mandating tug escorts for oil-transporting vessels. It also would tighten safety standards for pipelines and provide additional funding for the oil spill program administered by the Department of Ecology.
Strong opposition from Republicans in the Senate means the bill faces a steep uphill climb, its sponsor, Rep. Jessyn Farrell, D-Seattle, acknowledges. She failed to get similar legislation passed two years ago, instead passing a bill that improved safety only for oil transport by rail.
“I do think that there is a narrow path [to passage] but I will be honest, it is a heavy lift,” Farrell said.
That heavy lift is in no small measure due to the bill's proposal of a 2.5 cent increase in the state's existing oil barrel tax, bringing it to a total of 4.5 cents per barrel.
The bill is opposed by railroad, petroleum, and business interests. The Western States Petroleum Association argues that the barrel tax is an unfair way to fund the safety measures. Oil is not the only industry that these safety measures will apply to, the association argues, and nor is it the most likely to spill. The association points to data from the U.S. Coast Guard showing that from 2005-2015, fishing and recreational vessels were responsible for the most incidents of oil spills in Puget Sound, not oil transport vessels.
Since the 2015 passage of a bill on rail transportation of oil, two important things have changed: Canada approved energy giant Kinder Morgan’s expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline and the United States lifted a 40-year ban on crude oil exports.
Washington’s four northern refineries, located in Whatcom and Skagit counties, are connected to the Trans Mountain pipeline, though the main pipeline terminus is in Vancouver. Already existing improvements in pipeline pumping capacity over the last decade increased the share of crude oil coming into the state by pipeline from 9 to 24 percent from 2003 to 2013, according to the Department of Ecology.
“The way we move oil cross state and across water is rapidly changing,” says Farrell.
The lifting of the American export ban may have created incentives to increase the volume of oil moving through this state's five refineries. Environmentalists say they worry that, absent the crude oil export ban, refineries also could begin to act as crude oil export terminals, in addition to processing plants, without having to go through a review or permitting process. A provision in the bill would require refineries to alert the public and update safety measures if they begin exporting crude.
“They would essentially be acting as a dock,” says Rebecca Ponzio, oil campaign director for the Washington Environmental Council. “That changes the landscape significantly.”
A coalition of supporters of Farrell's bill includes not only firefighters but residents of communities near refineries and former refinery worker union representatives.
Steve Garey, a retired refinery worker and former union chief, spoke on behalf of the Blue Green Alliance at a February hearing on the bill. “We know how bad it can get with these substances and we know how quickly it can get bad,” he said.
“We know that sufficient emergency management resources are essential,” Garey added, “and that we cannot be properly prepared without them. The provisions in this bill will help ensure that we are properly prepared.”
The Washington States Petroleum Association’s Greg Hanon told the February hearing that Canada is requiring significant new maritime safety measures as part of the Trans Mountain project, including five new response bases along the shipping route. “Rather than implement the bill to respond to a prospective concern about the Canadian pipeline deal, we should be working with Canada and with B.C. to find out how we integrate our existing program with that new [maritime safety] program,” he said.
Farrell’s bill falls short of what's needed, contends Fred Felleman, a Seattle Port Commission member and a long-time environmental activist and consultant on maritime issues.
Felleman authored a 2016 study for Friends of the Earth that concluded the three most important steps to improving safety of vessel traffic in the Salish Sea were to require tug escorts in Puget Sound, create a coordinated transboundary Canadian-American spill response program and permanently position an emergency rescue towing vessel in the San Juans to prevent disabled ships and barges from grounding and potentially spilling. A 2016 Ecology Salish Sea Oil Risk Mitigation workshop came to the same conclusion. But of the three recommendations, the tug escort requirement is the only one in HB 1611.
“This bill is a good first step … we feel like it needs to go even further,” said Jamie Stephens, a San Juan County Council member.
Getting an emergency response vessel is what potentially affected residents are most concerned about. Right now the nearest one is in Neah Bay, at the tip of the Olympic Peninsula. The state stationed it there in 1999, and it has been deployed 57 times.
With the projected traffic increase from the Trans Mountain expansion, the likelihood of a 20,000 barrel or larger spill happening at the most difficult pass in the San Juans, Boundary Pass, would increase 800 percent, according to a vehicle traffic assessment done by researchers from George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University that was based on data from 2015.
A spill could be disastrous for a county whose economy depends on clean water and the pristine environment that brings tourism and creates high property values, residents say.
Vancouver is the third largest port in North America, and projections based on new and expanding projects, mostly on the Canadian side of the border, estimate that traffic from other industries will be increasing dramatically over the next few years. In 2015, San Juan County saw 11,580 vessels move through its waterways, but that number is expected to grow by 4,286 — a 37 percent increase in traffic, according to the vehicle traffic study. Most of that growth would be for coal, natural gas and oil transit.
Stephanie Buffum, the executive director of Friends of the San Juans, a local nonprofit teamed up with Friends of the Earth to monitor the oil traffic, says
“Our culture depends on clean water,” says Buffum.
This story has been corrected. It misstated that the vessel bound for Tacoma was a tanker. It is a barge. The increase in vessel traffic as a result of the Kinder Morgan pipeline is projected to be seven-fold, not nine-fold. The spelling of a name was also corrected.
This story has been updated to reflect the results of the vote on HB 1611 in the House Finance Committee.
This story is part of InvestigateWest’s Statehouse News Project, a crowdfunded effort to provide independent reporting on the Legislature. Please support the project with a tax-deductible donation at invw.org.
