[News] DAPL’s Dangerous Leak Detection System • Lakota People's Law Project

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.lakotalaw.org/news/2020-07-17/dapl-leak-detection?utm_source=ea&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=arld&utm_content=textlink2&sourceid=1042264&emci=52f616df-78c8-ea11-9b05-00155d03bda0&emdi=5429ed5c-07c9-ea11-9b05-00155d03bda0&ceid=4606549
DAPL’s
Dangerous Leak Detection System • Lakota People's Law Project
Kelsey Hill July 17, 2020
------------------------------

Every day over the last three years, the Dakota Access pipeline has pumped
over half a million barrels of Bakken crude under Lake Oahe in North Dakota
— the sole source of drinking water for the people of the Standing Rock
Sioux Tribe. All the while, it has operated with one of most criminally
inadequate leak detection systems of any pipeline in America.

Thankfully, recent developments coming out of the Washington D.C. court
circuits have heralded a significant victory for the Standing Rock
movement. Federal Judge James E. Boasberg, after vacating DAPL’s permit
earlier this year over inadequate environmental review, has ordered for the
pipeline to be shut down and emptied of its oil
<https://earthjustice.org/news/press/2020/judge-orders-dakota-access-pipeline-to-shut-down>.
This followed similar victories in a ruling against the proposed Keystone
XL pipeline and the cancellation of the Atlantic Coast pipeline.

In response to the ruling
<https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Energy-Transfer-Not-Shutting-Dakota-Access-Oil-Pipeline.html>,
a spokeswoman for parent company Energy Transfer (ET) stated in an email
that the company would not be shutting down the line, clarifying later that
they’d be seeking relief through the court system. That temporary relief
came down earlier this week, when a Court of Appeals froze Boasberg’s
order. While this allows DAPL to stay online for longer, the verdict
maintains the authority to halt operations at any time.

With the legal drama still unfurling, one thing is clear: DAPL failed to
meet basic environmental standards, and thus, it should be shut down
immediately.

DAPL’s potential hazard has not lessened over time. Dakota Access was and
is still one of the riskiest freshwater crossings by any pipeline in the
world, a fact which ET and the Army Corps of Engineers obfuscated and
downplayed as much as possible in the approval process. Adding to the
concern, if DAPL does remain open, its oil load is scheduled to double
soon, due to a North Dakota Public Service Commission ruling approving
<https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/02/19/dakota-access-pipeline-expansion-approved/4812580002/>
new pumping capability.

We commend Boasberg’s decision to hold DAPL to account for its faulty
environmental review process. Oil projects, even ones that contribute to
large corporate profits, shouldn’t be above environmental laws in this
country. That’s why Lakota People’s Law Project attorneys filed an amicus
(“friend of the court”) brief elucidating that argument in support of
Standing Rock’s attorneys at Earthjustice. You can read that here
<https://www.lakotalaw.org/resources/amicus-brief-dapl>.

As the DAPL saga continues, now four years after the start of the Standing
Rock movement, it remains pertinent to understand just how deeply
disastrous this project is.
*A Faulty System *

The Dakota Access pipeline is an unsafe piece of infrastructure. To begin
with, DAPL’s bore defies global and national standards for pipeline safety.
The 30-inch steel pipeline has been placed 92 to115 feet below Lake Oahe,
near the Standing Rock reservation boundary. The pipe was routed under the
lake using a technique called Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD), which
involves drilling a series of boreholes of increasing diameter while
propping open the borehole and then threading pipe through the tunnel that
is created. According to an independent assessment
<http://indigenousrising.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/ENVY-Report-on-DAPL-EA-07Jan17.pdf>,
this is one of the longest HDD projects in the world and violates the
standard practice of limiting HDD to under a mile (5,280 ft).

There are few, if any, crude oil pipelines in the world that have such a
long HDD component, especially under such a sensitive freshwater crossing
used for drinking water and agriculture. Worse, in the permitting process,
ET chose to reroute the pipeline adjacent to Lakota land, away from its
original trajectory nearer the largely-white areas of Bismarck and Mandan.
It also chose to throw out industry standards to create one of the riskiest
pipeline water crossings in the world. That is textbook environmental
racism.

Because DAPL is located near two natural gas pipelines
<https://northdakotapipelines.com/maps/> that cross under Lake Oahe at a
shallower depth, proponents of the pipeline (i.e. “DAPL Facts”) attempt to
dismiss concerns about DAPL’s environmental impact, arguing there’s nothing
uniquely threatening about Dakota Access. However, since crude oil is more
toxic and persistent than natural gas, a leak in DAPL would be much more
environmentally damaging than a leak from one or both of the natural gas
pipelines.

“Nobody has really dug into this issue of a pipeline going under such a
huge body of freshwater in an important reservoir that is a drinking water
source for a lot of Americans, so I started to investigate everything they
had planned to do,” said Steve Martin, energy infrastructure expert and
enrollee of the Chippewa nation. “There is no leak detection system in the
most critical part of the pipeline [Lake Oahe].”

Although Dakota Access has conspicuously not released any details on DAPL’s
leak detection system (LDS), an independent pipeline consulting company, ENVY
Enerji ve Çevre Yatırımları A.Ş. <http://www.envy.com.tr/>, performed an
assessment
<http://indigenousrising.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/ENVY-Report-on-DAPL-EA-07Jan17.pdf>
of DAPL’s environmental impact and found that DAPL’s LDS may be unable to
detect leaks of up to 1-2 percent of its total capacity per day (up to
11,400 bbl/day or 480,000 gal/day). If such a leak were to occur under Lake
Oahe, it would be undetectable until the oil migrated to the lake surface
and was spotted by an observer*. *If a leak occurred during the 3-4 months
per year when the lake is covered in several inches of ice, it may go
undetected until the ice melts.

To put it bluntly: DAPL is unable to detect 75 percent of potential leaks.
A leak detection system that can only detect leaks a quarter of the time
creates huge vulnerabilities, especially given the high risk it poses to
the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Surface expressions should not be the main
way leaks get detected, particularly in areas like the Lake Oahe crossing,
where leaks may not migrate to the surface for days, weeks, or even months.
*And if it leaks? *

A leak under Lake Oahe could be unfixable. The lake crossing is more than a
mile long, nearly 100 feet under the bottom of the lakebed. A leak there
would mean construction teams would have to drain the pipeline, pull it out
from the ground, redrill the borehole, and push a new section of pipeline
through.

Moreover, it could potentially spell ruin for the people living downstream.

Should a leak occur under the lake, containment and remediation efforts
would be greatly hampered by the depth of the pipeline underground and its
location under the lake. When discussing a worst case discharge scenario,
the Army Corps stated that routing the pipeline roughly 100 feet under the
lake would have a “greater response time” and would result in “high
consequences.”

Despite the extreme challenges posed by the physical location of the
pipeline, the Army Corps does not provide any plan in the existing
assessment to contain an underground leak or clean contaminated soil and
groundwater under Lake Oahe, placing a burden on the Tribe to do so.
Additionally, ET stock prices <https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ET?p=ET>
have been steadily dropping for the past four years, meaning the company
may not be in a solid enough financial position to pay for a major cleanup
project and would likely pass those costs onto local landowners and federal
taxpayers.

Additionally, the Army Cops failed to account for the multi-directional
flow of groundwater back and forth between Lake Oahe and its underlying
aquifers. Because the lake feeds the aquifer when water levels are high and
is fed by the aquifer when water levels are low, an oil spill could either
be confined to the lake or pulled downward to contaminate connected
aquifers. This situation creates the possibility of a slow leak (less than
2 percent of the pipeline’s daily flow rate) remaining undetectable as it
contaminates groundwater throughout the wet season when water is high, only
for that reservoir of contaminated groundwater to flow back up into the
lake during the dry season.

If this happens, it could literally poison the Native communities living
nearby for years to come.

Crude oil like that being pumped through DAPL is a mixture of thousands of
organic chemicals. This includes a large number of carcinogenic or
otherwise toxic chemicals, notably benzene and its derivatives, and a class
of compounds known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). These
chemicals, particularly PAHs, can bioaccumulate in plankton
<http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0074476>
and make their way up the food chain to harm fish, birds, and humans.

There are at least nine threatened or endangered species within the DAPL
project area, including the pallid sturgeon, the grey wolf, and the
whooping crane, all of which may be directly or indirectly affected by a
spill. The accumulation of toxic substances in fish is particularly
relevant for Standing Rock Sioux tribal members, some of whom rely on fish
from Lake Oahe for subsistence. A spill would cut off members of the Tribe
from both their primary source of drinking water and a ready source of
high-quality protein they have utilized for thousands of years.
*Moving Forward *

DAPL should have never been built to begin with. Its environmental review
was just as flawed as its inadequate leak detection. It threatens the life
and livelihoods of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and all the people
downriver. Oil flow should be shut off immediately.

As we await further news from the D.C. courts, we hope that these
dispatches from the NoDAPL trial archives help to dispel myths about the
so-called safety of oil pipelines.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20200718/81517b93/attachment.htm>