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Kinder Morgan red faced Company loses legal fight, retreats early from exploration of alternate route for Trans Mountain expansion; GPS coordinates wrong Gary Park For Petroleum News
Losing a legal fight can be costly, annoying and even embarrassing for a corporation.
Getting ridiculed in the process, with no place to hide, is not an experience that Kinder Morgan will soon forget.
The giant energy firm went through that humiliation at the end of November in British Columbia Supreme Court, leaving it with no option but to retreat early from its attempt to explore an alternative route for expansion of its Trans Mountain crude oil pipeline system in Metro Vancouver.
It has now halted drilling to test the viability of tunneling through Burnaby Mountain and pulled all of its equipment and crews out of the area after facing an anti-pipeline protest that garnered international attention because of the focus on plans to increase shipments of crude bitumen to 890,000 barrels per day from the current 300,000 bpd to refineries and tanker terminals in British Columbia and Washington state for export to Asia-Pacific markets.
A spokeswoman for Kinder Morgan said the crews finished drilling down to about 500 feet and issued a preliminary finding that the area appears stable enough for a pipeline.
She said the indications are that the pipeline extension could be built with a tunnel or directional drilling.
The samples collected will provide the necessary information for Kinder Morgan to submit as part of its application to Canada’s National Energy Board to proceed with the $5.4 billion project.
A Supreme Court judge refused to extend a court injunction against protesters for another 12 days to Dec. 12, forcing Kinder Morgan to pack up before completing its work.
Contempt charges dismissed But, more humbling still was the judge’s decision to dismiss all civil contempt charges against more than 100 protesters because of GPS errors by Kinder Morgan in specifying the exact location of its requested “no-go” zone.
The company conceded that it provided incorrect GPS coordinates when it initially requested a court injunction, with some of the data so inaccurate that the actual work site was completely outside the area covered by the injunction.
Because of the GPS errors, Kinder Morgan applied - at the judge’s invitation - to drop the civil contempt proceedings.
In a possible face-saving move, Kinder Morgan - in response to a suggestion by Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan, one of the most outspoken pipeline opponents - said it has not ruled out paying the costs of policing by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
However, a company spokeswoman told the Globe and Mail that an official request has yet to be made. “If (Corrigan) sends us a bill, we’ll assess it then,” she said.
The RCMP estimated that scores of officers were involved in round-the-clock duty at a cost of about C$100 an hour.
The spokeswoman said the company expects further activism as work proceeds on the project - one of the few times Corrigan agrees with Kinder Morgan, having alerted protesters to prepare for on-going battles as part of the widening campaign across Canada to block work on fossil-fuel pipelines, especially those sourced by crude bitumen from the Alberta oil sands.
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