In this era of fake news and post-truth, it is good to see everyday people - like Art Betke and me - go beyond the media and closely study technical and scholarly reviews on hot scientific and political issues.
Right now, none is hotter in this part of the world than the fight over the Trans Mountain pipeline which is designed and proposed specifically to move bitumen from Alberta to the coast where it can be shipped to Asian markets.
The tri-agency 2013 federal review compared the environmental challenges of transporting the bitumen product, diluted to make it fluid enough to move through pipelines, to conventional petroleum products. As Betke says - though he exaggerates the claims of environmentalists on the matter - the federal report indicated that, in significant ways, spilled conventional crude oil and dilbit (diluted bitumen) react similarly when discharged into water, fresh and salt. However, his recounting of what that report said is incomplete on the matter of comparability.
Here is a critical summary point from the report: "The two diluted bitumen products display some of the same behaviours as conventional petroleum products (i.e. fuel oils and conventional crude oils), but also significant differences..."
The recommendations that this comparison of conventional crude and dilbit led the report's authors to was that there were massive unknowns as to the fate and impact of possible large dilbit spills. And they further concluded that there is much less knowledge and know-how of how to deal with an at-sea dilbit spill. Unlike with spills of crude oil, there are no science-based established clean-up procedures for dilbit, known to be effective. That is a central reason why our B.C. premier can legitimately attempt, notwithstanding federal dominance, to demand far better prior knowledge, especially about how clean-up of spills could be done, as a precondition of going ahead with Trans Mountain.
As a final point, responding to Betke's closing statement that dilbit has been transported by pipeline in the U.S.A. for 40 years, I answer with one word: Kalamazoo. This is the location of a 2010 spill into a river that has been unusually difficult to clean up because it was dilbit, from which, after the diluent evaporated, heavy tarry bitumen did sink, greatly complicating clean-up.
Norman Dale
Prince George
