Leave it down the hole with the devil: Sour gas not safe by any measure, writes Andrew Nikiforuk

For the Calgary Herald

April 13, 2004

In a recent Don Braid column, Neil McCrank, the chairman of the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board (EUB), reassured Calgarians that sour gas is "safe;" that it has never killed any members of the public and that, aw shucks, any sour wells approved and drilled on the city's doorstep would be "the safest in the world."

With these happy comments, McCrank made it pretty clear that he doesn't live down wind from a sour gas plant and probably hasn't read his agency's own sober reports on sour gas. In any case, his naive statements are wrong.

Dead wrong.

Sour gas, of course, is many things. Geologically, it is hellishly deep gas contaminated by anaerobic bacteria. Economically, it is a big royalty earner for the government and a major provincial employer. No contest there.

But in scientific circles, sour gas, or hydrogen sulfide, is widely regarded as one of the world's most potent neurological toxins. One breath and you're a goner. Or brain damaged. This explains why several nations, including the U.S. and Canadian governments, have experimented with sour gas as a formidable weapon of mass destruction. So, no chemical warfare specialist or health expert would ever describe sour gas as safe.

Nor has any sour gas worker I've ever talked to. Moe Holman, a retired oilman with a fine sense humour and keen memories, calls H2S scary, dangerous and deadly. But he's never called it safe or friendly. One of his own instructors once admitted that, "If we had half a brain, we'd leave the damn stuff (H2S) down the hole with the devil." A lot of people in the industry quietly think that way.

McCrank then claims that the development of sour gas in Alberta has been "safe for the past 50 years." The public record, however, tells a different story.

In fact, the relentless exploitation of sour gas has left a costly trail of death, property devaluation, lawsuits, pollution, conflict and controversy throughout rural Alberta. It has killed thousands of cattle, displaced approximately 100 farmers and even set the notorious Wiebo Ludwig on his anti-industry crusade -- the largest case of industrial sabotage ($10 million) in North American history. I don't think a safe product would leave such a troubling legacy.

Nor does Holman. When he worked in the patch, he saw large pockets of sour gas "travelling along the ground at scary distances from where the failure occurred" and take out a flock of wild geese as well as cows. Holman lost two colleagues to sour gas accidents; their deaths still haunt him.

Yet, incredibly, McCrank claimed that "no member of the public has ever been killed as a result of sour gas, and no member of the public has ever had long-term impacts" from this great royalty earner.

Young oil patch workers are members of the public (one doesn't surrender citizenship when one enters the patch) and sour gas has killed 36 of them in the last 30 years in Alberta and British Columbia. Barbara Graff is a farmer and a member of the public and sour gas flaring by Crestar undid her family and permanently disabled two of her adult children in 1998.

Violet Holmes is a teacher and a member of the public and emissions from a Canadian 88 sour well paralysed half her face. Fred Whatmore and his family are farmers and members of the public and pollution from a PetroCanada sour gas plant knocked down their horses, contaminated their well water and forced them to leave their home this year.

McCrank knows all about the Graffs. As EUB chairman, he graciously gave this third-generation farm family from Vulcan three months to sell their farm before planting three more sour gas wells upwind from their property. But many of these cases aren't well known because the Alberta government has repeatedly refused to establish an H2S registry for workers and farmers injured by sour gas. Like McCrank, the government prefers the fiction that sour gas is safe.

Can't blame them, really. Fiction is easier to peddle than non-fiction.

Although the EUB has tried very hard to make sour gas facilities safe, accidents, spills and leaks still happen like clockwork. Just read the EUB's excellent field surveillance report for 2002. Half of the problems at oil batteries remain "equipment failure resulting in H2S emissions off lease." (Off lease can mean that the poison has trespassed onto your property and into your lungs.) About 40 per cent of sour gas plant inspections also note "off-lease emissions" as an issue. And since the early 1990s, the number of sour gas pipeline incidents has nearly doubled.

And what about property rights? A safe industry wouldn't devalue your property by 10 to 15 per cent (those are EUB figures) or expropriate 100 metres of your land on either side of sour gas pipeline, would it?

So, I rest my case. McCrank is entitled to his sweet opinions, but for most Albertans sour gas is and will always remain a poor neighbour and a risky venture. Although adding more and more facilities closer to populated areas just might give urban dwellers a true sense of the industry's hidden costs, no risk analyst in the world would ever call it safe.

Holman, a true sour gas expert, has a better word for such plans: "foolhardy."

Andrew Nikiforuk is an award-winning journalist and editor of The Land Advocate, a newsletter for western landowners living with oil and gas developments in their communities.