Oil & Gas

The art of managing an oil spill

A small Alberta-based environmental services company that specializes in cleaning up oil pipeline spills is very busy these days—good news for it, but bad news for the pipelines sector and crude oil producers.

The SWAT Group of Companies, formed in 2002 by partners Dean Sahara and Trever Miller, is growing so fast the pair is having a hard time finding enough experienced staff to manage the company’s diverse workload.

SWAT not only deals with spill response, it also trains managers and workers to respond to spills, offers spill contingency planning, conducts equipment reviews and procurement, and provides general environmental consulting and reclamation.

Sahara and Miller formed SWAT with little capital but with much experience in handling spills, especially those into water. “We started with nothing and worked our way up,” says Sahara. “Trever and I each have been involved in 500-plus spills in the last 20 or 21 years.”

The company, which now has 18 employees, won’t hire anyone for spill response unless they have experience with at least 200 spills, something that is difficult to find, notes Sahara. “Most come from the company Trever and I used to work for.”

That company has since gone out of business, as SWAT became the option of choice for water-based spill response.

A GROWING CONCERN

And now its reputation has spread beyond Western Canada, with the company being selected by ocean spill response organizations like Western Canada Marine Response and U.S.-based Marine Spill Response to help manage the cleanup of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill last year in the Gulf of Mexico. That incident killed 11 men working on a BP oil platform and led to the release of almost five million barrels of oil.

SWAT was also called to provide Calgary-based Enbridge with technical services regarding a spill last summer of over 20,000 barrels of crude into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan (the spill has cost Enbridge $550 million so far).

More recently, SWAT was chosen by Plains Midstream Canada to deal with a leak of 28,000 barrels of oil from a pipeline near Little Buffalo, Alta., the largest spill in Alberta in 36 years. The Rainbow pipeline, which runs for 772 kilometres from Zama, Alta., to Edmonton and carries about 180,000 barrels of oil daily, was shut down for several weeks while the spill was contained within an area of 800 by 50 metres.

SWAT has provided overall technical support at the Plains spill, where there have been up to 350 workers at any one time. “We are the overall site manager,” Sahara says.

That spill, which took place in late April, followed a smaller spill near Edson on April 22. A refined products line operated by Kinder Morgan spilled small amounts of product and was shut down for about a week.

Miller, 40, who has worked for 21 years in the oil and gas environment sector, says the number of spills has actually declined in Alberta, but there is more attention being paid to them worldwide by the media, environmental groups and government agencies.

“The number of spills is down in Alberta and the average size is smaller,” Miller says. “For instance, the average spill 20 years ago was 60 to 80 cubic metres and now it’s closer to 12 cubic metres. The difference is, the [pipeline and oil] companies are more diligent and want to develop better response programs.”

The Energy Resources Conservation Board says Alberta saw a pipeline failure rate of 1.7 per 1,000 kilometres of pipe in 2009, the most recent year for which statistics are available. That was a record low.

FILLING A VOID

Despite the decline in the number of incidents, the fact that many pipelines in Western Canada are aging—and there are about 580,000 kilometres of pipelines in Canada, carrying 2.7 million barrels of crude equivalent and 15.1 billion cubic feet of natural gas daily—means SWAT will continue to see its business grow.

“We’re in a niche market,” notes Miller. “There’s no other company that can do what we do. With Dean and I having responded to over 500 large-scale spills each, and our employees that have been on more than 200 spills each, there’s no other company with our experience.”

And now that it has entered the U.S. market—Sahara will still be working on Enbridge’s Michigan leak cleanup until late summer of this year—the pair says the trick will be finding enough experienced employees to work on response teams.

Miller says there are larger environmental companies that employ people worldwide who provide a variety of consulting, design, construction and environmental services to industry, but SWAT has developed a reputation for expertise in water-based spill management that it continues to build on.

It’s an expertise the head of a co-op established by the Canadian oil and gas industry to deal with water-based spills recognizes.

“SWAT is the specialist in incidents that involve water,” says Al McFadyen, president and chief operating officer of Calgary-based Western Canadian Spill Services (WCSS), which is supported by about 550 members, including most of those involved in the Canadian oil and gas industry. “Their skills are being recognized because they’ve been involved throughout Alberta and in the BP Gulf of Mexico spill and in the Enbridge spill in Michigan.”

WCSS, formed in 1996, coordinates the spill responses of 18 different co-operatives in Alberta and British Columbia. Through equipment- and knowledge-sharing agreements with five other co-ops, it also helps respond to spills in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

McFadyen says that although petroleum spills are relatively common, surface water spills are somewhat rare.

“There are 1,200 to 1,500 spills a year reported in Alberta alone,” he says. “Most of them represent small volumes, which the companies involved can deal with on site. However, any spill of more than three cubic metres must be reported to the regulators.”

WATER WOES

Land-based spills can be a challenge, but they are nowhere near as formidable as surface water accidents, adds McFadyen.

“It is likely companies themselves would contain a land-based spill by using excavation equipment,” he says.

But serious water-based spills are somewhat rare. For instance, in 2008 WCSS was involved in cleaning up 17 such spills and in 2009 it worked on seven. However, those spills can be disastrous when they occur.

One of the most serious in recent years took place when a CN train left the tracks near Wabamun Lake, a popular recreational area 65 kilometres west of Edmonton. That incident led to the escape of more than 700,000 litres of bunker oil and chemicals into the lake in August 2005.

Members of WCSS pay annual fees ranging from $1,000 to $120,000, depending on the size of the company’s operations. The collection of those fees has allowed the co-op to buy more than 80 pieces of equipment, including different types of skimmers, booms and 25 different types of boats.

Several pieces of that equipment have been involved in the recent Plains cleanup. Although SWAT has its own equipment, including nine skimmers, two mobile spill units and other equipment, the WCSS equipment is also at their disposal.

“They really don’t have many staffers to deal with water-based spills, which is why we get involved,” explains Miller.

It’s similar in other areas of Canada and in the United States, where provincial and state co-ops comparable to WCSS have equipment but not a lot of staffers skilled in dealing with such spills. “There are larger companies that deal with offshore spills in the U.S.,” he says.

It seems as if there’s cyclicality involved with major spills, Miller observes. It can be months—and even years—between major incidents. “The majority of spills are pretty small,” he says. “Out of 1,200 spills maybe 12 are larger and unique.”

Miller, who studied environmental science at Calgary’s Mount Royal University before entering the field, says he finds the work very rewarding.

“You have to be somewhat of an adrenalin junkie,” he says. “But I’m proud to be doing my part to protect the environment.”

And because “every spill is different,” it’s a skill set that can only be learned in the field.

Sahara says it’s impossible to learn how to respond to water-based spills in the classroom, since skills developed in the field are essential for effective response.

“You need to have common sense and you need to be able to think outside the box,” he says. “It involves being able to look at a big problem and to be to think about what will be coming next. It’s about assessing a crisis situation quickly, such as deploying a boom on a fast-moving river.”

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