360 Degree View

March 6, 2008

From the office building I work in there is a good 360 degree view of the city of Saint John, New Brunswick. Looking out the east side of the building you can see the Irving Oil Refinery. In front of the refinery you can see the Irving Paper plant. To the right you see the three red and white stacks of the Courtenay Bay oil fired 109MW generating station owned by NB Power.

Looking out the west side of the building you can see the Irving pulp mill at Reversing Falls and the nearby Irving Tissue plant. To the far left, in the distance (not in picture) you would find the stacks from the Coleson Cover generating station, a 978MW oil fired facility also owned by NB Power. If you could see a little further west you would see the nuclear power plant at Point Lepreau. I think it’s reasonable to say that Saint John has its fair share of industrialization.

Living in Saint John, New Brunswick, it’s hard to find a vantage point where you can’t see something Irving related. Besides the 3 operations mentioned above there’s the dry docks (now shut down), gas stations and convenience stores, office buildings, hardware stores and on and on. Irving is also in the midst of building a mammoth LNG terminal on the Bay of Fundy. You get the idea. If all of the Irving related industry in town suddenly vanished many, many people would be out of work.

From the refinery’s web site

The Irving refinery in Saint John is Canada’s largest, producing over 300,000 barrels of quality finished energy products per day. From that daily production, we export approximately 175,000 barrels of petroleum products to the US Northeast, including 100,000 barrels of reformulated gasoline (RFG)—that’s about 42% of all Canadian petroleum exports and about 45.5% of US RFG imports.

The refinery uses as an input a huge amount of a finite natural resource. It imports this resource from far away places by ship. Diesel burning ships. Then using a massive amount of input energy, it creates as an output 300 000 barrels of products which, when consumed, will contribute significantly even more to the green house gas problem. And….we’d like to build another refinery here, just as big as the one we already have. The projected cost will be in the 5 - 7 billion dollar range.

We’re pretty damned excited about it too. Why? Because the construction project will result in about 5000 temporary jobs and 1000 permanent jobs. And we expect that our property values will increase. Of course in order to reap the benefit of our increased property value we’d have to sell our houses and move to someplace where the property value hasn’t gone up. We usually don’t talk about that part.

Of course there will be an environmental impact assessment performed to make sure that there won’t be any negative impact on the local environment. Sort of. The federal government will be doing an EIA for the proposed new wharf. The province is responsible for the rest. However, that may put the province in a bit of a conflict of interest. Given the amount of people Irving employ, and the contribution they make to the province’s economy they yield, shall we say, a certain political influence in the province. I’m not sure how objective a provincial EIA could be.

In an interesting development, the Conservation Council of New Brunswick and The Friends of the Earth are challenging this in court. See the full press release on the CCNB web site.

Launched by Ecojustice (formerly Sierra Legal Defence Fund) on behalf of the Conservation Council and Friends of the Earth Canada, the lawsuit challenges the federal government’s decision to dramatically restrict its assessment of the environmental impact of the proposed Irving refinery to the facility’s wharf structure – ignoring obvious local and transboundary air pollution, impacts on endangered Atlantic salmon and Right whales, and the global warming impacts of the refinery.“Minister Baird’s decision to evaluate the wharf and turn a blind eye to the refinery itself is not only illegal, it is plainly absurd,” said Ecojustice lawyer Justin Duncan. “The law is clear; the federal government must conduct an assessment of the entire project in order to evaluate the impact this refinery will have on the health of the region’s residents and the environment. ”

An interesting example of why the CCNB et al don’t have faith in the province to properly execute the EIA:

If not overturned by the federal court, John Baird’s decision to study only the wharf would leave the assessment of the refinery’s environmental impacts to the province whose environmental assessment process failed to protect the environment from the massive upgrade of the existing Irving refinery. For example, the existing refinery’s emissions of carcinogenic benzene have increased by a factor of ten since the refinery upgrade, increasing the levels of benzene in Saint John’s air by 60 percent. The provincial environmental assessment process found there would be no change in emissions of this carcinogenic air pollutant.

Now to me, that’s a significant piece of information for a couple of reasons. One is that it clearly illustrates the the EIA for the expansion of the existing refinery missed predicting a serious environmental concern. Second, is the very fact that benzene output has increased by a factor of ten and benzene levels in the air have increased 60 percent! It seems we’ve been paying some hidden costs for the economic prosperity the refinery expansion has brought us. I’m guessing the hidden costs of a whole new refinery may be even higher.

Initial reports in the local newspaper about the law suit didn’t mention the benzene issue. That was strange I thought. Oh wait….Irving owns all the local newspapers too. Actually they own nearly all the newspapers in the province. That’s handy.

Eventually the paper did cover the benzene issue. Irving says the readings are wrong. Benzene levels didn’t rise that much. But funny that never came up in the paper until Irving had a statement on the matter.

So will anything be uncovered in an EIA that will prevent a new refinery from being built? No, not likely. If Irving wants to build one, ultimately they will. I doubt finding an underground colony of magical unicorns or a school of mermaids living in the Bay of Fundy would prevent it. The best we can probably hope for is that the CCNB is successful in their bid to have a Federal EIA executed and the findings ensure that the refinery is built and operated in the most environmentally friendly manner. An environmentally friendly oil refinery…..

As a footnote, it seems that the Federal Environment minister is not favoring the Irvings by waiving the EIA. This seems to be the status quo for the department.

Posted in Canada, Fossil Fuels, Industry, New Brunswick