Reports surfacing that ExxonMobil may have known about the risks associated with moving diluted bitumen through the Pegasus pipeline in Arkansas brings about the following response from me:
Yep.
I say this not in a "of-course-the-evil-corporate-behemoth-knows-that-its-likely-to-kill-nature-and-babies-and-doesn't-care" sort of way, but rather because EM employs thousands of engineers and as a rule - especially for the engineers oil companies can afford to hire - they inherently understand the imperfection in systems like pipelines. Engineers design, maintain, and reconfigure systems based upon the best information available at the time, the best practices at the time, and the acceptable level of risk given by ownership at the time.
And therein lies the point: the acceptable level of risk to an executive looking to tap into new markets varies greatly from the acceptable level of risk to a parent raising a child within a mile of a pipeline being reconfigured for use beyond its intended design.
The engineers who oversaw the reconfiguration of the pipeline used information from "the 2006 hydrotest [ExxonMobil] performed on that stretch of pipe ... conducted at stress pressures appropriate for calibrating maximum operating pressures, but not at levels experts believe is necessary to rid a pipeline of seam crack threats. The stress pressure Exxon used in 2006 also was lower than the stress pressure it used in 1991 to test a newer segment of the Pegasus." Engineers have an ethical requirement to protect the health, safety and welfare of people when they sign off on design work, and that would have applied to this effort as well. But they also have to be faithful trustees to their employer, and as long as their employer asks of them something legal and not in conflict with protecting health, safety and welfare, they are obligated to do it.
And therein lies the second point: by allowing the pipeline to run near a residential area, the people of Arkansas told ExxonMobil - and therefore its engineers - that having a pipeline with "acceptable level of risk" running near people was ok. No one associated with the approval process considered the pipeline accident-proof, and as long as the engineers relied upon practices consistent with the standard of care in the industry, they did everything they were supposed to do. (As did engineers designing Fukushima, and Three Mile Island)
Which leads us to the last point: that makes no sense.
Elizabeth Douglas at Inside Climate News suggests that "Exxon took calculated risks given the known condition of the 20-inch pipeline and either used a flawed integrity management plan, or had a good plan and didn’t adhere to it." But that tries to assign blame to the company when the blame lies with us. It is just as likely that the engineers at ExxonMobil did everything they were supposed to do within the ethics of their practice, standards in the industry, and legal requirement to protect the people near the rupture site. Pointing blame at ExxonMobil minimizes the true issue:
We have to allow our engineers to hold themselves to a higher ethical standard.
As long as balance sheets and insurance rates tell engineers how much they can threaten the health, safety, and welfare of people, they will be bound to provide their clients with solutions such as what happened at Pegasus. If we stiffen regulation on professionals and require them to calculate the likely risk scenarios, and prove that more people would be harmed by inaction than by action, then corporate decisions such as the one that lead to the reconfiguration of Pegasus will not happen in the future.
But be prepared, neither will new coal plant construction, new car manufacturing, or bridge opening (to name a few). We have told our engineers - our stewards of applied science and gatekeepers of our quality of life - that risking the lives of some to maintain quality of life for many is ok.
If you do not think it is, then you need to do something about it.
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