ABOARD THE SALISH DEFENDER, Port. Angeles — The May opening of the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion in British Columbia has led to a sevenfold increase in oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Juan de Fuca so far this year.
On average before the expansion, which came online this spring, one tanker a week traveled through these transboundary waters. Now, a tanker a day is making the trip.
The increased tanker traffic was anticipated, but only in recent months have onlookers realized a concerning development in Canada’s big bet on growing its oil exports: Not all of these tankers are heading for out-of-state ports.
Instead, a significant number are carrying hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil at a time through some of Washington’s trickiest navigable saltwater, to refineries near sensitive shorelines, bays and intricate channels. The ships are also spending more time at anchorages.
While these deliveries and storage stints are legal, environmental scientists say they increase the risk of a low-probability — but extremely high consequence — spill that would devastate the Salish Sea’s fragile ecology. Responders are only able to typically remove a fraction of oil in a spill, and tides and currents would slather crude on reefs and rocky coves and potentially across hundreds of islands.
What’s more, these tankers are usually carrying Canadian diluted bitumen, a type of oil that scientists say is potentially harder to clean up in a spill.
Both state and federal law require oil transport companies to prepare stringent spill response plans, conduct regular drills to stay in compliance and keep a fleet of response vessels at the ready. But environmental advocates like Port of Seattle Commissioner Fred Felleman say the risk in Washington’s inland waters is disproportionate. Although the Lummi, Suquamish, Swinomish and Tulalip tribes, as well as Gov. Jay Inslee, all registered opposition to the pipeline expansion last decade, neither tribal nor Washington state government had jurisdiction over Canada’s decision to export more crude via tanker.
“Washington’s waters are now exposed to increasing volumes of sinking oil being transported by foreign tankers plying the narrow straits to the refineries when the stated intention was for them to head out to sea to the global marketplace,” said Felleman, who authored a 2016 report on diluted bitumen shipments in the Salish Sea. “We’re taking the brunt of the risk for a premise that the pipeline wasn’t built on.”
Washington’s Department of Ecology says it has not been caught off guard by the more-frequent stops.
“We were aware that some tankers could offload at Washington refineries, consistent with what has occurred in the past,” a department spokesperson wrote in an email. “We did not expect this would be a large percentage of tanker transits, which appears to be true so far.”
Canada has invested CA$170 million in an upgraded oil spill response as part of the Trans Mountain approval process, including new vessels that could assist on a spill in Washington waters. Washington, which historically views its spill response regime as stronger than its Canadian counterparts, has made more limited changes since the pipeline expansion was announced, mostly to regulatory requirements. The state requires the oil industry to maintain sufficient response capability, which has included acquiring new vessels in the last decade, although the state’s largest oil spill response vessel is now slated to be sold.
Ultimately, the new trend of tankers carrying crude, including diluted bitumen, through Washington waters for extended stretches will test the state’s prevention and response posture.
“Our elected leaders have decided at what level the state is willing to invest or require industry to invest,” said David Byers, an Ecology spill response section manager, speaking aboard the department’s Salish Defender observation boat during an August spill-response drill in Port Angeles. “Our approach does the best good with the resources that we are blessed to have positioned throughout Puget Sound.”
New trips to WA refineries
On May 22, the Dubai Angel left the Westridge Marine Terminal in Burnaby, B.C., laden with 550,000 barrels of oil, marking the first export of Canadian crude from the expanded Trans Mountain Pipeline. The otherwise routine departure for the global energy industry’s workhorse fleet of tankers marked the culmination of a 12-year saga.
Increase in oil tanker traffic through the Salish Sea
First proposed in 2012, the expansion twinned the existing pipeline built in 1953 from Alberta to British Columbia. (The 69-mile Puget Sound Pipeline spur serves Washington’s refineries in Ferndale and Anacortes.)
At peak capacity, nearly 900,000 barrels of oil (up from 300,000 barrels) per day can flow into the market via the Salish Sea. From June through September, 81 tankers and five barges loaded at Westridge, compared with 14 tankers in the first five months of the year.
With the additional capacity, Canada, the world’s fourth-largest oil producer, is poised to post the biggest growth in petroleum production of any country this year despite having made a national pledge to have net-zero emissions by 2050.
When the Canadian government rescued the foundering pipeline project in 2018, officials touted access to Asian markets as their primary motivation. The expectation was that nearly all of the additional oil leaving Westridge would move through the transboundary waters of B.C. and Washington en route to the Pacific Ocean, with a projected increase from five to 34 vessels per month — or from roughly weekly to daily.
But to the public, the additional trips to refineries in Washington state were not made clear.
A March presentation by Trans Mountain to the Puget Sound Harbor Safety Committee, and shared with The Seattle Times, included a map showing shipping lanes used by Trans Mountain marine traffic. The highlighted route showed the typical run west of San Juan Island and through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which would lead to the Pacific. On another map, arrows point west and south along the West Coast with “Asia” and “USA” denoted as the main destinations for outbound vessels.
“Historically, most shipments that have left from Westridge were destined for California, however, we expect this to shift as the expansion fills to capacity, resulting in approximately 50 per cent of the oil being destined for Asia and approximately 50 per cent for the U.S.,” a Trans Mountain spokesperson wrote via email.
The shipping lanes that travel to Washington’s refineries were not highlighted in the presentation, nor in the company’s 2019 project application to the Canadian National Board of Energy.
But they are now being used. For example, the oil tanker Tarbet Spirit left Westridge on July 19. It followed the standard route through Haro Strait, but then turned east off Port Angeles, instead of west. From there, it threaded the needle between Cypress and Guemes islands and settled into anchorage off Vendovi Island Preserve, an uninhabited island owned by the San Juan Preservation Trust. Six days later, it unloaded 586,000 barrels of oil at the Phillips 66 refinery in Ferndale. The tanker repeated the journey in August, then loaded at Westridge a third time in September before leaving for China.
The Tarbet Spirit is not alone. According to Department of Ecology documents, tankers departing the Westridge Marine Terminal made 16 deliveries of crude oil to Washington refineries from May 25 to Aug. 31.
A Trans Mountain spokesperson disputed the significance of the map showing marine traffic routes, adding that demand at Washington refineries for Canadian crude exceeds the capacity of the Puget Sound Pipeline spur.
“The maps in the presentation were for illustrative purposes only, and specifically highlight the routes most often utilized by ships calling to Canadian destinations,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “The market will determine where a vessel will call once it departs our dock.”
Spill consequences
In August, trained crew members aboard the W.C. Park Responder, until recently Washington’s largest vessel built to react to oil spills, practiced for the worst. This drill was organized by the Department of Ecology and the U.S. Coast Guard, one of 95 to 125 annually. A crane operator maneuvered a skimmer to simulate removing oil from the water.
Indicative of the oil industry’s ample presence here, a nearby anchored barge stood at the ready with capacity to store up to 80,000 barrels of oil.
The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, prompted this level of preparedness. In response, the U.S. petroleum industry chartered the Marine Spill Response Corp., which most oil transporters contract with to meet their regulatory obligations, including in Washington. However, MSRC is downsizing its Salish Sea presence. In September, KONP radio reported that the company put the Port Angeles-based Park Responder up for sale and laid off an unspecified number of employees.
“Removing a large asset like the Park Responder could put several companies out of compliance with certain planning standards,” the Ecology spokesperson wrote. Falling out of compliance risks a $100,000 per day fine.
MSRC did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Just months before the Exxon Valdez spill, Washington had its own major spill. A line snapped from a tug towing the barge Nestucca laden with 3 million gallons of bunker oil off Grays Harbor. The two vessels collided in rough seas and the tug punctured the Nestucca, resulting in a spill of over 230,000 gallons that drifted north to Vancouver Island, down the Oregon coast and into Puget Sound. That disaster pushed Washington to adopt more stringent regulations and stricter oil spill cleanup protocols, as well as initiate better coordination with Canadian and B.C. counterparts as the incident was a reminder that floating oil does not respect international boundaries.
While those two incidents shaped modern oil spill response in the Pacific Northwest, the arrival of diluted bitumen has arguably changed the game yet again.
For decades, environmental advocates and some scientists have warned that diluted bitumen, the main product from Alberta’s oil sands that is pumped through the Trans Mountain Pipeline, has a propensity to sink rather than float, which makes the oil harder to clean up. Other scientists, as well as petroleum industry entities including Trans Mountain, insist diluted bitumen is not fundamentally different from other types of crude around which oil spill response preparedness like Washington’s is structured.
In 2010, diluted bitumen spilled and sank in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, the largest real-world case study to date. But until there is a major spill in saltwater, there is no certainty about how crude from Albertan oil sands behaves.
“We don’t want to be the guinea pigs when this product does spill in marine waters,” said Lovel Pratt, marine protection and policy director at Friends of the San Juans. Based on the high cost of the Michigan spill, her group is calling on the Department of Ecology to increase oil-handling companies’ liability from $12,500 to $60,153 per barrel. It also wants Ecology to bump up the maximum financial responsibility for refineries in the event of a spill from $300 million to $1 billion.
While Haro Strait and the Strait of Juan de Fuca are relatively wide and unobstructed shipping lanes, the routes to Washington refineries in Whatcom and Skagit counties are not. As far back as 1978, environmental and fisheries scientists from the Canadian government studied 27 tanker routes in the Salish Sea and found the journey to Cherry Point in Ferndale the most treacherous, passing just a mile from underwater reefs, with the Guemes Channel passage to Anacortes the second most dangerous.
Those conditions heighten the risks for tankers. So far, Trans Mountain says the majority of shipments to Washington refineries since the expansion opened have been light crude, not diluted bitumen.
The Department of Ecology’s oil-recovery target for spills is 25%. But given the range of variables, from amount of oil to location to tides and currents, the exact consequences of a spill are difficult to predict.
In 2015, researchers with the SeaDoc Society attempted to model potential impacts at the behest of Coast Salish tribes as the Trans Mountain Pipeline proposal heated up and found that a wide range of Puget Sound marine life, from Dungeness crab to pinto abalone, eelgrass to kelp forests, rockfish to herring, would all be adversely affected.
Now one of the study’s authors believes the risks are even greater given what is known about diluted bitumen.
“It’s not the traditional oil spill,” SeaDoc Society Science Director Joseph Gaydos said. “It’s very scary to me from a biodiversity impact perspective because it could be settling on rocky reefs, and we have no way to get this stuff out of there like we can off a beach or skimming it off of the surface.”
Ounce of prevention
Back at the drill in Port Angeles, the Department of Ecology stood by its oversight of spill response plans.
“A spill from an oil tanker is a low-probability, high-risk event,” said David Byers, the Ecology spill response manager, pointing to incidents like the 2022 sinking of the fishing vessel Aleutian Isle as a more frequent type of spill response. “If there are more tankers, that doesn’t mean we need more spill capacity. We just have to make sure that we have the system in place for that one bad day.”
Both government regulators and private industry take considerable measures to avoid that one bad day. Double hulls and backup propulsion systems are among the industry-standard redundancy measures for oil tankers. In the wake of the Trans Mountain expansion, the Canadian government expanded the distance of required tug escort for all laden tankers in Canadian waters to a point off Neah Bay, while previously tankers traveled unescorted after they reached Victoria.
Tankers are also guided by maritime pilots, local navigation experts, with B.C. pilots handing the ship over to Puget Sound pilots when the tanker is destined for Washington refineries. Washington also requires tug escort. Increasingly since July, tankers are traveling directly from Burnaby to Ferndale instead of via Port Angeles.
This increased marine traffic is coordinated by the U.S. Coast Guard’s Seattle-based Vessel Traffic Service to avoid collisions and scramble responders in the event of a loss of propulsion or other risky incident.
Byers acknowledged the risks of sunken oil from diluted bitumen and pointed to spill response contingencies that involve divers and dredging. A department spokesperson wrote via email that any entity carrying oil that may sink through Washington waters must be prepared to maintain “non-floating oil planning standards.”
In September 2023, Ecology completed two studies at the Legislature’s behest. One analyzes whether to expand the scope of mandatory tug escort, a requirement for tanker ships since 1975. (A state law passed in 2019 requires escorts for barges, but negotiations are ongoing to implement the new regulation.) The other evaluates the potential addition of an emergency response towing vessel closer to the San Juan Islands. Currently, the only such vessels are stationed in Neah Bay and in Beecher Bay, B.C. The volunteer Islands’ Oil Spill Association has first responders available throughout the San Juans to make assessments in the critical initial hours of a spill but lacks heavy-duty towing capacity.
“You can’t get from Neah Bay to Haro Strait in a time frame that is relevant to keeping a ship off the rocks,” said Felleman, who owns property in the San Juans.
If the Legislature were to authorize an additional emergency response towing vessel in the San Juans, it would bring some peace of mind to the likes of Pratt at Friends of the San Juans. For all the response preparedness drills, there is an even more effective method of addressing such a disaster.
“The most important thing is to prevent oil spills from happening in the first place,” Pratt said.
