Trans Mountain is committed to maintaining the highest standard of environmental protection for waterways and river crossings. Through the experience gained during 60+ years of operations, we have developed a proactive and mature suite of programs to maximize the safety of the pipeline, enhance environmental stewardship and mitigate any potential issues.

Over the past three years, we have led a robust public engagement program that has included consultation with thousands of individuals. The input and feedback we’ve gathered, along with our experience, has resulted in a number of pipeline design mitigation measures to reduce risk of loss of containment at watercourse crossings including:

• Refined routing of the proposed expansion as compared to the existing pipeline to avoid 22 crossings at significant fish bearing rivers such as the Fraser River near Rearguard, upper North Thompson, Albreda, Coldwater and Coquihalla rivers.

• Applying a rigorous Risk-Based Design approach that goes beyond the minimum requirements of the Canadian Standards Association CSA Z662 Standard for Oil and Gas Pipelines. It’s an industry leading, world-class design approach that will enable the design team to identify potential risks along the new Line 2 pipeline and the new delivery lines and to pre-emptively adopt mitigation measures at the design phase to address those risks. The mitigation measures to be adopted that exceed the requirements of CSA standards have led to the following design enhancements for watercourse crossings:
  • Increase in pipeline wall thickness at crossings of watercourses of significance.
  • Exceeding in-stream depth of burial requirements required by Code of Practice design and construction standards including using 1:200 year flood design instead of current industry practice 1:100 year design floods and accounting for climate change effects of increased flood magnitude and frequency.
  • In the very low likelihood event of loss of containment of the pipeline, an increase in isolation valves from 55 to 126 since the NEB Application would result in a reduction of potential spill volumes at many high consequence areas along the pipeline route.

For the necessary watercourse crossings to be crossed, construction impacts will be minimized by using innovative trenchless construction methods where feasible, such as Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD)for selected watercourse and use of an isolated technique at most of the remaining watercourses.

The isolated installation method will be scheduled to occur during the least-risk window to fish species wherever possible. Up to 1,000 potential watercourses along the proposed pipeline corridor have been investigated and studied to determine potential impact to fish and fish habitat during pipeline construction. A report on the results of a Self-Assessment of the Potential for Serious Harm to Fish and Fish Habitatwas submitted to the NEB on March 1, 2015 and concluded that with the mitigation proposed, no serious harm was expected from any of the primary crossing methods proposed.

Trans Mountain also performs regular emergency response and equipment deployment exercises, including exercises on rivers, to practice our response in the event of an incident. The most critical and responsible emergency preparedness strategy is to prevent a spill from occurring at all. However, in the case of a spill, Trans Mountain is prepared to respond quickly with detailed emergency procedures and trained professionals. Our goal is to have world-class emergency response plan that is never used.