Some 6.5 million litres of oil, saltwater and other petroleum products have spilled from Manitoba pipelines since 2008 — but none of the incidents have garnered provincial penalties or fines.
Instead, the bulk of pipeline monitoring and oversight is left to the industry, including the responsibility for reporting, cleaning and rehabilitating spill sites.
Manitoba Environment and Climate Change Minister Tracy Schmidt called the previous Conservative government’s cuts to the department and inspection capabilities a “decimation” that led to “gaps” in oversight. She said the NDP government has been taking steps to make changes since a major fuel supply pipeline was shut down due to safety concerns in March.
“I think that we have really seen the decimation of the petroleum branch, the mines branch, the Environment and Climate Change Department,” Schmidt said in an interview.
Manitoba’s oil patch, tucked into arid farmland in the southwestern corner of the province, has seen more than 11,400 wells drilled — 4,000 of which are currently producing — and comprises more than 5,000 kilometres of active pipelines and flowlines. Thousands of barrels of oil are extracted every day. The industry currently generates more than $1 billion in revenues annually.
There are currently 4,000 active oil wells in the province.
Pipelines have accounted for more than half of the 12 million litres of oil and saltwater — used for horizontal fracturing, or fracking — that spilled from oil and gas facilities, including wells and storage tanks, in the last 16 years.
Leaving industry to self-regulate can leave Manitobans without access to transparent information about how pipeline spills impact their communities, or what remedial actions are being taken, experts say.
“It’s really a self-governance model where industry gets to mark its own homework,” Alan Andrews, a Vancouver-based lawyer with the environmental law charity Eco-Justice, said in an interview.
In the aftermath of the shutdown of Winnipeg’s main fuel supply line in March, the Free Press/Narhwal undertook an examination of pipeline oversight in the province.
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS FILES
The Winnipeg Products Pipeline was shut down in March after Alberta-based owner Imperial Oil discovered safety concerns in a section of pipe
The Free Press/Narwhal analyzed two publicly available provincial oil spill records: annual spill summaries from 2008 to 2023 and itemized reports detailing the size, approximate location and cause of each spill since 2017.
According to the annual summaries, there’s been an average of 61 spills per year. While the spills most frequently occur at well sites and storage tanks, pipelines have, in most years, been the source for the most volume.
More than half of the total volume of oil and saltwater spilled since 2008 — about 6.5 million litres, or 41,500 barrels worth — has come from 219 pipeline and flowline spills.
Oil spills from pipelines can contaminate soil and water, harm wildlife and impact Indigenous hunting, fishing and traditional land-use rights, while saltwater spills can render cropland barren, pose risks to freshwater ecosystems and contaminate drinking water, Andrews said in an interview.
“The risk of this self-regulation model is that industry has no real incentive for being transparent and owning up to their mistakes,” he said.
One of the province’s largest oil spills occurred in 2013 when a flowline near the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border ruptured, spilling more than 100,000 litres. Cleanup operations involved digging up 4.5 metres of contaminated earth across an area the size of about two football fields.
“There’s land in the Virden area that had saltwater spilled on it in the 1950s and that land still doesn’t produce today,” Carlyle Jorgensen, a Cromer-area farmer and then-vice president of landowner advocacy group the Manitoba Surface Rights Association, told the Brandon Sun at the time.
The most significant incident occurred in 2013 when a flowline ruptured near the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border, spilling more than 100,000 litres of oil.
“We feel that the province needs some specific regulations for the oil companies to follow because leaving it up to the oil companies obviously isn’t working.”
While the province provides data through the annual and itemized spill reports, it does not provide any information on enforcement, inspections or remedial actions.
The spill data is also inconsistent. The provincial spill summary for 2021, for example, references six pipeline spills totalling 550,000 litres. The itemized report, however, lists five pipeline or flowline spills that year totalling 46,000 litres, a figure a provincial spokesperson later said is incorrect and the result of reporting errors.
Andrews said it’s crucial the public is able to access transparent information about the environmental impact of spills in their community and steps being taken to address them.
“The right to know whether your water has been contaminated or your air polluted is really a fundamental human right,” he added.
The petroleum branch, under the department of Economic Development, Investment, Trade and Natural Resources, is responsible for pipeline spill investigations. Companies are legally mandated to report any leaks to the regulator within 12 hours, and inspectors are to attend the site within 24 hours.
Under Manitoba’s oil and gas laws, companies are responsible for containing and cleaning up spills, including mitigating harms to people, property and the environment and rehabilitating any impacted land. Companies must also “take steps to prevent the occurrence of a similar spill.”
But it’s unclear how often Manitoba’s inspectors are following up.
A pump jack west of Virden. Manitoba’s oil patch generates more than $1 billion in revenue annually.
An analysis by the Free Press/Narwhal revealed petroleum inspectors conduct few formal, documented inspections. Staff informally visit and inspect oil and gas infrastructure, but there are no records of these inspections.
According to a provincial spokesperson, there were a total of 13 formal inspections for all 5,000 kilometres of active pipelines and flowlines in the last five years. In that same time, there were more than 40 pipeline spills.
When spills are investigated, Manitoba’s oil and gas act allows the regulator to issue companies fines of up to $100,000, but the province has yet to make use of this enforcement tool.
The provincial spokesperson said no fines have been issued since at least 2008.
“Most (recent spills) would be the result of something minor like a corroded valve so there would not have been any negligence involved,” the spokesperson said in an email.
Economic Development, Investment, Trade and Natural Resources Minister Jamie Moses said the province is able to issue non-compliance notices as a “first step” in its enforcement system. It is also able to order a pipeline to shut down. Fines can be issued if companies disregard such notices, Moses said.
“We get into a much better position after those compliance notices are issued,” he said.
“In the past, and certainly under the previous government, there might be some legitimate concerns about inconsistent reporting procedures.”–Minister Tracy Schmidt
The province does not publicly report the number of non-compliance notices issued to oil companies.
Environment Minister Schmidt said the province became aware of “gaps … in governmental oversight” of pipelines after Winnipeg’s main fuel supply pipe was shut down for preventative maintenance by owner Imperial Oil in March. The company took steps to repair the Gretna-to-Winnipeg pipeline after an internal inspection revealed a section of the pipe running under the Red River was at risk of failing.
During the previous government’s tenure, Schmidt said, inspector jobs were slashed and environmental inspections across the province — be it oil and gas or otherwise — were reduced by half.
“In the past, and certainly under the previous government, there might be some legitimate concerns about inconsistent reporting procedures,” she said, but the province is moving to close those gaps.
She said the government recently introduced a policy mandating “every single incident will have formalized inspection reports completed by the province.” (She did not specify when this policy change took place.)
The government is also taking steps to restore staffing in the petroleum branch, hiring two inspectors since the Imperial Oil pipeline shutdown, bringing the total number of inspectors to three.
Manitoba’s environment minister Tracy Schmidt says departmental cuts by the previous government left significant gaps in oversight of Manitoba’s oil industry.
On the enforcement front, the province tabled legislation that will allow the government to issue administrative penalties for companies with projects licensed under the Environment Act. (Nine provincially regulated pipelines are currently listed in the environmental licensing registry.)
“That will improve our ability to enforce environmental standards against proponents when there are situations such as these,” she said, referring to the mid-March pipeline shutdown over safety concerns.
Moses added the government is also looking at “regulatory changes” to strengthen its oversight system but could not give further details.
Effective pipeline management is dependent on the province having enough capacity to take the lead on oversight, Andrews said.
“It’s much better to have a model where regulators are properly armed with the powers, expertise and capacity they need to get the job done, are independent from industry and can do inspections, monitoring, enforcement and — crucially — issue fines that are at least equivalent to the damage that has been done,” he said.
“If you scrimp and save on environmental enforcement, you’re going to pay the price down the line in terms of the cost of cleanup, which is always going to be an order of magnitude greater than the cost of running an effective compliance and enforcement regime.”
julia-simone.rutgers@freepress.mb.ca
Julia-Simone Rutgers
Reporter
Julia-Simone Rutgers is the Manitoba environment reporter for the Free Press and The Narwhal. She joined the Free Press in 2020, after completing a journalism degree at the University of King’s College in Halifax, and took on the environment beat in 2022. Read more about Julia-Simone.
Julia-Simone’s role is part of a partnership with The Narwhal, funded by the Winnipeg Foundation. Every piece of reporting Julia-Simone produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.
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