Reuters is reporting that the Korean Gas Corp is selling part of its stake in the Shell-led LNG Canada project in Kitimat.
Reuters says KOGAS CEO Jang Seok-hyo told the World Energy Congress that the company is considering selling 5 to 10 per cent of its stake in the LNG Canada project. It currently holds 20 per cent.
The sale is apparently an effort to improve the company’s bottom line. The South Korean government recently began a review of state-owned oil and gas investments with are suffering from poor profits.
Kogas, which is the world’s largest corporate buyer of LNG, is also considering selling part of its 15 per cent holding in the $18.5 billion Gladstone LNG (GLNG) project in Australia.
Screen grab American Petroleum Institute interactive map of LNG export projects. (API)
The American Petroleum Institute, the lobby group for US energy companies has launched an interactive map on its website covering liquefied natural gas export projects.
The API says the U.S. Department of Energy has approved only four applications for permits to export liquefied natural gas nations that don’t have a free trader agreement with the US, adding: “There are currently 21 pending applications, covering 18 discrete facilities where U.S. businesses are seeking to build and operate terminals to process LNG for sales abroad.”
While the map does show proposed projects at Kitimat and Prince Rupert, the “interactivity” does not give details, while there is detailed information on the US projects including “anticipated capital investments, jobs, and export volumes associated with each U.S. site, as well an estimated value of potential exports.”
At least one of the two large liquified natural gas projects in Kitimat is, at least at this point, planning to self-generate the power required using a gas-fired, steam-driven electrical generation system.
The job, which requires 20 years and more experience, would be located in Calgary for eighteen months, then move to Kitimat for the remainder of a four year contract paying from $1650 to $1850 per day.
By Fircroft describing the job as a “mega-project” means that the client is either Shell’s LNG Canada project or the Chevron and Apache KM LNG project, since the much smaller BC LNG project could not be described as a “mega-project.”
As well as the standard qualifications for a senior engineer, the job posting lists:
• Power Plant design, operation and construction experience required.
• Boiler design, construction, operation, and commissioning experience required.
• Heat Recovery Steam Generation (HRSG) design, processes, construction, operation, and commissioning experience required.
• Integrates inherent safety in design and operability in concept selection and development for gas resource opportunities.
Providing the power for the Kitimat and other northwestern LNG projects is becoming controversial. The power is needed to cool the natural gas so it can be loaded onto tankers for shipment to customers.
The BC government recently announced a $650,000 study of the cumulative effect on air quality for the planned industrial expansion in the Kitimat area, including the Rio Tinto Alcan Kitimat modernization project, which would increase the amount of sulphur dioxide emissions, combined with as many as three LNG projects and the associated increase in tanker traffic, as well as the possible and even more controversial Enbridge Northern Gateway project.
At the time of the BC announcement, the Globe and Mail reported:
If natural gas is used either for direct-drive or combined-cycle electricity generation to produce the energy required for the proposed Shell LNG facility at Kitimat, approximately 300 million cubic feet of natural gas would be burned. The proposed Chevron Apache LNG facility could burn approximately 140 million cubic feet of natural gas.
The other alternative for powering the LNG plants is to use hydro-electricity, and BC Hydro at the moment doesn’t have the capacity to supply the LNG projects with power. One possibility is the controversial Site C dam project in the Peace River basin, which is also under review by the BC government.
Although the job is restricted to Canadian citizens or permanent residents, it is clear that the engineer will have to also answer to the project’s overseas partners since one requirement is to conduct: “Overseas VIP workshops, including Value Engineering, Process Simplification, Process Optimization and Design to Capacity.”
Documents show that Enbridge supplied the coffee for a secret briefing on “critical energy infrastructure.” (CBC)
Updated with Guardian report and link
Documents obtained by The Guardian and by CBC News under the Access to Information Act show that Canada’s security agencies, the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, together with other departments including Natural Resources Canada and the National Energy Board met with Canada’s big energy companies, including Enbridge, to discuss threats to the country’s energy infrastructure.
As the agenda obtained by CBC shows, Enbridge supplied the breakfast, lunch and coffee for those attending the security conference.
The agenda for the conference show there were panels on “BC Resource Development,” and “Aboriginal Protests and Occupations.”
The Guardian reports:
the meetings – conducted twice a year since 2005 – involved federal ministries, spy and police agencies, and representatives from scores of companies who obtained high-level security clearance.
Meetings were officially billed to discuss “threats” to energy infrastructure but also covered “challenges to energy projects from environmental groups”, “cyber security initiatives” and “economic and corporate espionage”.
Fin whale in Squally Channel (Courtesy Chris Picard)
Whales are coming back to Douglas Channel.
In 2013, many Kitimat residents with long experience on the water have reported and are still reporting more sightings of both orcas and humpback whales.
Add to this a recently published scientific study that shows the number of humpbacks at the mouth of the channel near Gil Island has doubled in the past decade, with the study saying there were 137 identifiable whales in 2011.
So why are the whales returning? Chris Picard, Science Director for the Gitga’at First Nation and one of the co-authors of the study believes that answer is simple. There are, so far, three species of whales seen in the area, humpbacks, orcas and fin whales. It is only now, Picard believes, that the humpback and fin whale populations are recovering from a century of whaling.
The study estimates there were once about 15,000 humpback whales in the North Pacific when whalers began hunting the animals. That number was down to 1,400 when whale hunting was stopped in Canada in 1966.
As whale numbers increase, they are searching for the rich food sources found in the Channel, both at the mouth around near Gil Island where the study took place and as far north as the Kildala Arm and Clio Bay.
“One of the things the humpbacks like to do when they are on our coast or the Alaskan coast and that is they feed,” Picard said, “So they are really targeting areas that there is a high density of their preferred prey, krill or herring or other schooling fish, sardines in some years.”
So far the study has concentrated in Gitga’at traditional territory around the mouth of Douglas Channel near Gil Island. Picard says increasing the study area to include more of Douglas Channel is a good idea, but would require more resources than are currently available. “We’d like to continue with the study consistent with the work that we have been doing. Considering what we’re seeing in the local Douglas Channel area, Wright Sound, Gil Island, it can be very worthwhile.
“We are going to continue with our current study which involve getting to know how many humpbacks are using the area and continue with the study that we just published to see if numbers continue to increase or to see whether or if they do start to stabilize at some number,” Picard said. “With more and more proposals for increased shipping, we get to see any changes with humpback numbers that may be linked to increased shipping. We’ll continue to monitor the humpback population; not just their numbers but also their distribution in the area. We’ll continue to monitor that, again in relation to the various shipping proposals and activities that are proposed.”
It was during that study on humpbacks that the researchers from the Gitga’at Nation and the Cetacean Lab noticed the appearance of fin whales, another species that had been hit hard by whaling. (“We’ve worked very closely with the Cetacean Lab group and frankly without their help we would never have published any of this work because their data certainly was instrumental in getting the overall data set that made possible a publishable study,” Picard said.)
“We have observed is that fin whales have increased in their abundance in the area quite a bit, “ Picard said. “I can remember when we first started doing surveys, there were not too many. We’ve gone from seeing a couple over the course of an entire year. Now when we do our marine mammal surveys in the area the fin whales you pretty much see in every survey and in more and more numbers. So it’s quite encouraging to see that fin whales are becoming more abundent in the area. They were also hunted, so if you factor in the days of commercial whaling operations, that of course has stopped, so its encouraging to see that their numbers are coming back too.
The fin whales tend to be found in many of the same areas at the humpack whales are using, Caamaño Sound, Campania Sound and areas south of Gil Island. “we’ve also seen them more in the interior waters like Squally Channel, Wright Sound, Whale Channel, similar to the areas where we see the humpbacks.
“We haven’t done the same level of detailed analysis on the fin whale distribution as we have with the humpback, so it’s just my overall impression that they’re using similar habitats.
“It’s unique for fin whales to be using these more confined waters. It is my understanding that they are more of an open water species. I think that makes the area fairly unique,” he said.
Picard added it would be interesting to do a historic study to see how many fin whales were taken by whalers in the previous decades, especially in Caamaño Sound, Squally Channel and Wright Sound.
“The fact that we saw so many humpbacks relative to the size of the area, which is pretty small relative to the whole coast, so there must be a high abundance of food in the area,” Picard said.
“I’d like to get a better understanding of what is really driving the food abundance in the area. What is the oceanography in the area, what are the currents, what is driving that high area of biological activity that the whales seeming to be homing in on.”
Humpback whale in the Kildala Arm, September 14, 2013. (Robin Rowland)
That means, Picard believes, that there could be krill and juvenile herring schooling in the upper Douglas Channel and that is what is attracting the whales.
One of the next steps, Picard said, is to study social interaction among whales. “We do take identification photographs, so we get a sense of who’s hanging out with who; who is bringing their calves into the area to introduce them into what seems to be very good whale habitat,” Picard.
So one aim of a future study would be to se what role social interactions play in the increased whale sightings in the Douglas Channel. He also wants to know what role are the potential negative impacts on that whale social interaction comes noise impacts, or being struck by ships, and the potential environmental affects of oil spills. “So do these social interactions decrease as the impacts increase, does that mean there are going to be fewer whales that come into this area? Those are some of the questions we want to address.”
Carrie Mishima, a communications advisor for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans sent this statement in response to questions from Northwest Coast Energy News:
· The proposal by the Kitimat LNG project uses a relatively new technique that is expected to improve aquatic habitat in Clio Bay. The bay has been used as a log handling site for decades, resulting in areas of degraded habitat from woody debris on the seafloor. The project will cap impacted areas with inert material to restore the seafloor.
· Capping at smaller-scale sites in Canada has shown that the technique has successfully restored low-value aquatic habitat.
· The project will implement standard and project-specific measures to protect fish and aquatic habitat and will conduct a five-year monitoring program to determine how well the habitat is recovering.
· Data from the monitoring program will be used to guide future habitat reclamation at impacted habitat sites. Reference sites are being established as benchmarks against which the capped sites can be measured.
· Site-specific standards for dissolved oxygen levels will be developed for the enhanced site by sampling a control site having similar habitat parameters.
· Detailed mapping has been done to identify the best areas for the soil placement and to protect sensitive habitat such as intertidal areas, rocky substrates and eelgrass beds.
· Other required mitigation measures will include analyzing the cap material to confirm it is free of contaminants and placing this material during appropriate tidal conditions to ensure accurate placement of the cap in accordance with design plans.
A job for a “construction area superintendent” for both the Kitimat LNG plant and the Clio Bay restoration appeared on job sites in the world wide web on October 1. The posting expires on December 31.
The job was originally posted by Brunel Energy, a consulting firm that describes itself as a company that “provides specialist personnel to the international oil & gas, petrochemical, power generation and construction industries.”
The contract job, which, requires 20 years experience and will pay between $1,500 and $2,500 a day, calls for someone who would be “developing project level execution plans for EW&I, LNG Plant & Clio Bay restoration program, and implement/control against these plans in accordance with Project Management System (PMS) processes, procedures and standards.” That superintendent will eventually turn over “functioning facilities to LNG Plant or operations staff.”
As well as standard requirements for a giant construction job of this nature, the requirements include:
• Represent the Company in all interfaces with BC and Kitimat agency associated with EW&I construction activity. Maintaining a positive relationship with the agency by conforming to all regulations and resolving areas of uncertainty in a mutually agreeable manner.
• Maintaining positive relations with the First Nations Haisla representative, recognizing them as a partner and owner of the overall Kitimat LNG Project Development.
Chevron and Apache are partners in the development of the KM LNG project at Bish Cove.
Special report: Clio Bay cleanup: Controversial, complicated and costly
Log booming operations at Clio Bay, August 21, 2013. (Robin Rowland/Northwest Coast Energy News)
Chevron, the company operating the KM LNG project at Bish Cove and the Haisla Nation have proposed that marine clay from the Bish Cove construction site be used to cap more than 10,000 sunken and rotting logs in Clio Bay. Haisla Chief Counsellor Ellis Ross says he hopes that using clay to cover the logs will help remediate the environmentally degrading sections of the Bay. The proposal has brought heated controversy over the plan, both among residents of Kitimat and some members of the Haisla Nation, who say that Clio Bay is full of life and that the capping will cause irreparable damage.
An investigation by Northwest Coast Energy News shows that capping thousands of sunken logs is a lot more complicated and possibly costly than anyone has considered. It is also clear that many of the comments both supporting and opposing the Clio Bay project are based on guesses rather than the extensive scientific literature available on the subject.
Northwest Coast Energy News findings include:
In 1997, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans surveyed sunken log sites in Douglas Channel. The results, published in 2000, identified 52 sites just on Douglas Channel and the Gardner Canal that had various levels of enviromental degradation due to sunken logs. Clio Bay was not the list. The DFO scientists recomended followup studies that never happened.
Scientific studies show that degradation from sunken logs can vary greatly, even within one body of water, due to depth, currents, number of logs, and other factors. So one part of a bay can be vibrant and another part environmentally degraded due to low levels of dissolved oxygen and decaying organic material.
If KM LNG wasn’t paying for the remediation of Clio Bay, it could be very expensive. Capping sunken logs at a cove near Ketchikan, Alaska, that is the same size and shape as Clio Bay cost the US and Alaska governments and the companies involved $2,563,506 in 2000 US dollars. The total cost of the cleanup of the site which was also contaminated with pulp mill effluent was $3,964,000. The estimated cost of capping the logs in the Alaska project was $110 per cubic yard.
The Alaska project shows that a remediation project means while most of the logs in a bay or cove can be capped, in some parts of a water body, depending on currents, contamination and planned future use, the logs have to be removed and the area dredged.
Agencies such as the State of Alaska, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Army Corps of Engineers all recommend using “clean sand” for capping operations. Although “clay balls” have been used for capping in some cases, the US officials contacted say they had no record of large amounts of marine clay ever being used for capping. They also noted that every log capping project they were aware of happened in sites that had other forms of contamination such as pulp mill effluent.
Chevron only recently retained the environmental consulting firm Stantec to study Clio Bay. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has told District of Kitimat Council it recently completed mapping of the seafloor at Clio Bay. The Alaska project was preceded by five years of monitoring and studies before capping and cleanup began.
A letter from Fisheries and Oceans to the District of Kitimat says that Clio Bay has been mapped and the department is planning to monitor any capping operations. However, it appears from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans website that the department has no current policies on remediation since the Conservative government passed two omnibus which weakened the country’s environmental laws. According to the website, new remediation policies are now being drafted. That means that although DFO will be monitoring the Clio Bay operation, it is uncertain what standards DFO will be using to supervise whatever happens in Clio Bay.
Northwest Coast Energy News is continuing its investigation of the sunken logs problem. Expect more stories in the days to come.
Special report: Clio Bay cleanup: Controversial, complicated and costly
Clio Bay, looking toward Douglas Channel, September 14, 2013. (Robin Rowland/Northwest Coast Energy News)
Haisla First Nation Chief Counsellor Ellis Ross says the Haisla made the proposal to the KM LNG project, a partnership of Chevron and Apache, to use the marine clay to cover the thousands of logs at the bottom of Clio Bay after years frustration with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the BC provincial government, which for decades ignored requests for help in restoring almost fifty sunken log sites in Haisla traditional territory.
The problem is that remediation of the hundreds of sites on Canada’s west coast most containing tens of thousands of sunken logs has been so low on DFO’s priority list that even before the omnibus bills that gutted environmental protection in Canada, remediation of sunken log sites by DFO could be called no priority.
Now that the KM LNG has to depose of a total of about 3.5 million cubic metres of marine clay and possibly other materials from the Bish Cove site, suddenly log remediation went to high priority at DFO.
The controversy is rooted in the fact that although the leaders of the Haisla and the executives at Chevron knew about the idea of capping Clio Bay, people in the region, both many residents of Kitimat and some members of the Haisla were surprised when the project was announced in the latest KM LNG newsletter distributed to homes in the valley.
Chevron statement
In a statement sent to Northwest Coast Energy News Chevron spokesperson Gillian Robinson Ridell said:
The Clio Bay Restoration Project proposed by Chevron, is planned to get underway sometime in early 2014. The proposal is fully supported by the Federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Haisla First Nation Council. The project has been put forward as the best option for removal of the marine clay that is being excavated from the Kitimat LNG site at Bish Cove. Chevron hired Stantec, an independent engineering and environmental consulting firm with extensive experience in many major habitat restoration projects that involve public safety and environmental conservation. The Haisla, along with Stantec’s local marine biologists, identified Clio Bay as a site that has undergone significant environmental degradation over years of accumulation of underwater wood debris caused by historic log-booming operations. The proposal put forward by the marine biologists was that restoration of the marine ecosystem in the Bay could be achieved if marine clay from Chevron’s facility site, was used to cover the woody debris at the bottom of the Bay. The process outlined by the project proposal is designed to restore the Clio Bay seafloor to its original soft substrate that could sustain a recovery of biological diversity.
Kitimat worried
Non-aboriginal residents of Kitimat are increasingly worried about being cut off from both Douglas Channel and the terrestrial back country by industrial development. These fears have been heightened by reports that say that Clio Bay could be closed to the public for “safety reasons” for as much as 16 months during the restoration project.
The fact that Clio is known both as a safe anchorage during bad weather and an easy to get to location for day trips from Kitimat has made those worries even more critical.
There is also a strong feeling in Kitimat that the residents were kept out of the loop when it came to the Clio Bay proposal.
In a letter to the District of Kitimat, DFO said:
Clio Bay has been used as a log handling site for decades which has resulted in areas of degraded habitat from accumulations of woody debris materials on the sea floor. The project intends to cap impacted areas with inert materials and restore soft substrate seafloor. The remediation of the seafloor is predicted to enhance natural biodiversity and improve the productivity of the local fishery for Dungeness crab. The project area does support a variety of life that will be impact and therefore the project will require authorization from Fisheries and Oceans Canada for the Harmful Alteration, Disruption or Destruction (HADD) of fish and fish habitat.
The letter avoids the controversy over the use of marine clay but saying “inert material” will be used. That can only increase the worries from residents who say that not only clay but sand, gravel and other overburden from Bish Cove and the upgrade of the Forest Service Road may be used in Clio Bay. (The use of “inert material” also gives DFO an out if it turns out the department concludes the usual practice of using sand is better. That, of course, leaves the question of what to do with the clay).
Although Ellis Ross has said he wants to see large numbers of halibut and cod return to Clio Bay, the DFO letter only mentions the Dungeness Crab.
DFO website cites pending changes after the passage of the omnibus bills.
Try to search “remediation” on the DFO site and the viewer is redirected to a page that cites the omnibus bills passed by the Conservative government and says
On June 29, 2012, the Fisheries Act was amended. Policy and regulations are now being developed to support the new fisheries protection provisions of the Act (which are not yet in force). The existing guidance and policies continue to apply. For more information, see Changes to the Fisheries Act.
On April 2nd, 2013 the Habitat Management Program’s name was changed to the Fisheries Protection Program.
So, despite what communications officers for DFO and the Harper government may say, there was no policy then and there is no policy now on remediation of log sites. Given Harper’s attitude that LNG and possibly bitumen export must proceed quickly with no environmental barriers, it is likely that environmental remediation will continue to be no priority—unless remediation becomes a problem that the energy giants have to solve and pay for.
Alaska studies
On the other hand, the State of Alaska and the United States Environmental Protection Agency spent a decade at a site near Ketchikan studying the environmental problems related to sunken logs at transfer sites
Those studies led Alaska to issue guidelines in 2002 with recommended practices for rehabilitating ocean log dump sites and for the studies that should precede any remediation project.
The Alaska studies also show that in Pacific northwest coast areas, the ecological effects of decades of log dumping, either accidental or deliberate, vary greatly depending on the topography of the region, the topography of the seabed, flow of rivers and currents as well as industrial uses along the shoreline.
The Alaska policy is based on studies and a remediation project at Ward Cove, which in many ways resembles Clio Bay, not far from Kitimat, near Ketchikan.
The Alaska policy follows guidelines from both the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Army Corps of Engineers that recommend using thin layers of “clean sand” as the best practice method for capping contaminated sites. (The Army Corps of Engineers guidelines say that “clay balls” can be used to cap contaminated sites under some conditions. Both a spokesperson for the Corps of Engineers and officials at the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation told Northwest Coast Energy News that they have no records or research on using marine clay on a large scale to cap a site.)
The EPA actually chose Sechelt, BC, based Construction Aggregates to provide the fine sand for the Ward Cove remediation project. The sand was loaded onto 10,000 tonne deck barges, hauled up the coast to Ward Cove, offloaded and stockpiled then transferred to derrick barges and carefully deposited on the sea bottom using modified clam shell buckets.
The EPA says
Nearly 25,000 tons of sand were placed at the Ward Cove site to cap about 27 acres of contaminated sediments and 3 other acres. In addition, about 3 acres of contaminated sediments were dredged in front of the main dock facility and 1 acre was dredged near the northeast corner of the cove. An additional 50 acres of contaminated sediments have been left to recover naturally.
A report by Integral Consulting, one of the firms involved at the project estimated that 17,800 cubic metres of sand were used at Ward Cove.
In contrast, to 17,800 cubic metres of sand used at Ward Cove, the Bish Cove project must dispose of about 1.2 million cubic metres of marine clay at sea (with another 1.2 million cubic metres slated for deposit in old quarries near Bees Creek).
Studies at Ward Cove began as far back as 1975. In 1990 Alaska placed Ward Cove on a list of “water-quality limited sites.” The studies intensified in 1995 after the main polluter of Ward Cove, the Ketchikan Paper Company, agreed in a consent degree on a remediation plan with the Environmental Protection Agency in 1995. After almost five years of intensive studies of the cove, the sand-capping and other remediation operations were conducted from November 2000 to March 2001. A major post-remediation study was carried out at Ward Cove in 2004 and again in 2009. The next one is slated for 2015.
Deaf ears at DFO
“We need to put pressure on the province or Canada to cleanup these sites. We’ve been trying to do this for the last 30 years. We got nowhere,” Ellis Ross says. “Before when we talked [to DFO] about getting those logs and cables cleaned up, it fell on deaf ears. They had no policy and no authority to hold these companies accountable. So we’re stuck, we’re stuck between a rock and hard place. How do we fix it?”
Ross says there has been one small pilot project using marine clay for capping which the Haisla’s advisers and Chevron believe can be scaled up for Clio Bay.
Douglas Channel studies
The one area around Kitimat that has been studied on a regular basis is Minette Bay. The first study occurred in 1951, before Alcan built the smelter and was used as a benchmark in future studies. In 1995 and 1996, DFO studied Minette Bay and came to the conclusion that because the water there was so stagnant, log dumping there had not contributed to low levels of dissolved oxygen although it said that it could not rule out “other deleterious effects on water quality and habitat`from log dumping.”
That DFO report also says that there were complaints about log dumping at Minette Bay as far back as 1975, which would tend to confirm what Ross says, that the Haisla have been complaining about environmentally degrading practices for about 30 years.
Ross told Northwest Coast Energy News that if the Clio Bay remediation project is successful, the next place for remediation should be Minette Bay.
A year after the Minette Bay study, DFO did a preliminary study of log transfer sites in Douglas Channel, with an aerial survey in March 1997 and on water studies in 1998. The DFO survey identified 52 locations with sunken logs on Douglas Channel as “potential study sites.” That list does not include Clio Bay. On water studies were done at the Dala River dump site at the head of the inlet on Kildala Arm, Weewanie Hotsprings, at the southwest corner of the cove, the Ochwe Bay log dump where the Paril River estuary opens into the Gardner Canal and the Collins Bay log dump also on the Gardner Canal.
In the introduction to its report, published in 2000, the DFO authors noted “the cumulative effect of several hundred sites located on BC coast is currently unknown.”
Since there appears to have been no significant follow-up, that cumulative effect is still “unknown.”
In 2000 and 2001, Chris Picard, then with the University of Victoria, now Science Director for the Gitga’at First Nation did a comparison survey of Clio Bay and Eagle Bay under special funding for a “Coasts Under Stress” project funded by the federal government. Picard’s study found that Eagle Bay, where there had been no log dumping was in much better shape than Clio Bay. For example, Picard’s study says that “Dungeness crabs were observed five times more often in the unimpacted Clio Bay.”
Although low oxygen levels have been cited as a reason for capping Clio Bay, Picard’s study says that “near surface” oxygen levels “did not reliably distinguish Clio and Eagle Bay sediments.” While Clio Bay did show consistent low oxygen levels, Eagle Bay showed “considerable interseasonal variation” which is consistent with the much more intensive and ongoing studies of oxygen levels at Wards Cove.
Chevron’s surprise
It appears that Chevron was taken by surprise by the controversy over the Clio Bay restoration. Multiple sources at the District of the Kitimat have told Northwest Coast Energy News that in meetings with Chevron, the company officials seemed to be scrambling to find out more about Clio Bay.
This is borne out by the fact, in its communications with Northwest Coast Energy News, Chevron says its consulting firm, Stantec has cited just two studies, Chris Picard’s survey of Clio Bay and a 1991 overview of log-booming practices on the US and Canadian Pacfic coasts. So far, Chevron has not cited the more up-to-date and detailed studies of Ward Cove that were conducted from 1995 to 2005.
Chevron says that Stantec marine biologists are now conducting extensive field work using divers and Remote Operated Vehicle surveys to “observe and record all flora and fauna in the bay and its levels of abundance. Stantec’s observations echoed the previous studies which determined that the massive amount of wood has harmed Clio Bay’s habitat and ecosystem.”
In its statement to Northwest Coast Energy News, Chevron cited its work on Barrow Island, in Western Australia, where the Chevron Gordon LNG project is on the same island as a highly sensitive ecological reserve.Chevron says the Australian site was chosen only after a thorough assessment of the viability of other potential locations, and after the implementation of extensive mitigation measures, including a vigorous quarantine program for all equipment and materials brought on to the Barrow island site to prevent the introduction of potentially harmful alien species.
Reports in the Australian media seem to bare out Chevron’s position on environmental responsibility. Things seem to be working at Barrow Island.
Robinson went on to say:
Those same high environmental standards are being applied to the Kitimat LNG project and the proposed Clio Bay Restoration project. The proposed work would be carried out with a stringent DFO approved operational plan in place and would be overseen by qualified environmental specialists on-site.
The question that everyone in the Kitimat region must now ask is just how qualified are the environmental specialists hired by Chevron and given staff and budget cuts and pressure from the Prime Minister’s Office to downgrade environmental monitoring just how stringent will DFO be monitoring the Clio Bay remediation?
Alaska standardsIn the absence of comprehensive Canadian studies, the only benchmark available is that set by Alaska which calls for:Capping material, typically a clean sand, or silty to gravelly sand, is placed on top of problem sediments. The type of capping material that is appropriate is usually determined during the design phase of the project after a remediation technology has been selected. Capping material is usually brought to the site by barge and put in place using a variety of methods, depending on the selected remedial action alternative.
Thick Capping
Thick capping usually requires the placement of 18 to 36 inches of sand over the area. The goal of thick capping is to isolate the bark and wood debris and recreate benthic habitat that diverse benthic infauna would inhabit.
Thin Capping
Thin capping requires the placement of approximately 6 – 12 inches of sand on the project area. It is intended to enhance the bottom environment by creating new mini-environments, not necessarily to isolate the bark and wood debris. With thin capping, surface coverage is expected to vary spatially, providing variable areas of capped surface and amended surface sediment (where mixing between capping material and problem sediment occurs) as well as limited areas where no cap is evident.
Mounding
Mounding places small piles of sand or gravel dispersed over the waste material to create habitat that can be colonized by organisms. Mounding can be used where the substrate will not support capping.
