Companies in charge of oil pipelines in eastern Canada and Maine renewed their promise that oil sands from northern Alberta are not on their way to Portland, though an application filed this week has environmental groups sounding alarms.

Groups such as Environment Maine and the Natural Resources Council of Maine raised the issue earlier this year after a Canada-based pipeline operator, Enbridge, indicated that it would file an application with Canadian energy regulators to reverse the flow of Line 9, leading from Sarnia, Ontario to Montreal.

In the wake of that announcement, environmental groups warned that Enbridge would likely work with the Portland-Montreal Pipe Line company to reverse the flow of the Maine pipeline. The groups are worried the reversal would introduce into Maine’s aging pipeline heavy crude from western Canada, a substance they call “tar sands oil.”

Due to concern regarding past spills of Enbridge pipelines, the groups, according to Environment Maine director Emily Figdor, want to “head off” any possibility the heavy crude would flow through Maine’s water-rich environment, including the Lakes Region. Enbridge filed its reversal application in Canada Nov. 29, and Maine environmental groups put out a joint press release the same day announcing that tar sands are on the “doorstep of Maine.”

Enbridge and Portland-Montreal Pipeline, however, say no plans are in the works.

“Nothing has changed,” said Ted O’Meara, PMPL company spokesman. “There is no current project to reverse the flow in the pipeline. There is nothing now. What the future holds, don’t know. But there is nothing at this time.”

An Enbridge spokesman, Graham White, also denied any reversal proposal that extends beyond Montreal.

“Nothing’s changed. What is different now, as we have said we would, we have filed the application [to reverse the flow to Montreal]. We said we were on target to file it before the end of this year, so we have filed it, on Nov. 29 with the national energy board. It’s on their website, anybody can go look at it. It’s got lots and lots of detail and exactly what we’re proposing,” White said.

White is aware of the environmental groups’ charges and said Enbridge is not interested in reversing the line beyond Montreal.

“And I’ll say this again. There is no U.S. contingent to this project, and none of our plans at this point include a U.S. contingent,” he said. “The claims that we’re looking to ship crude to the coast or through the Portland-Montreal pipe are false.”

Figdor and others, however, don’t buy the claims, mainly because Montreal refineries can’t handle the amount of oil being produced in western provinces. They say a reversal to Portland would open up more avenues to American refineries, where the abundant oil sands could be processed in such products as gasoline, jet fuel, heating oil and diesel, and for use in plastics manufacturing.

“They don’t have enough refining capacity in Montreal to refine it all,” Figdor said.

Enbridge, however, says it has taken that into account.

“That’s true, that’s why it’s going to Quebec City, as well,” White, the spokesman, said. “There are two clients: Suncor in Montreal and Ultramark in Quebec City. So between the two refineries, there’s easily enough for them to refine.”

White also says environmentalists’ worries regarding “tar sands” are unfounded and uninformed. He said a small amount of heavy crude may be shipped to Montreal but “it’s primarily light crude, because that’s what the refineries at the end of that line have the capabilities to refine – they don’t have significant heavy crude refining capabilities, so it’s primarily light crude to refineries in Montreal and Quebec City. That is the scope of this project.”

Lakes Region residents have spoken loudly and even demonstrated on the shores of Sebago Lake in recent months in an attempt to head off the heavier crude being shipped through their back yard.

Figdor and others say a leak is not guaranteed. But based on multiple pipeline spills around the country, they say it’s a strong possibility, and one that could devastate the tourism economy as well as Portland’s drinking water source, depending on the size of the spill.

The crux of the issue is the viscosity of the heavier oil, Figdor said.

“Tar sands oil is as much as 70 times thicker than conventional oil, so you need more pressure to move it through a pipeline and that increased pressure raises the temperature of the product. And there’s a lot of evidence heat is related to pipeline ruptures, it’s a pretty linear relationship,” Figdor said.

White said environmentalists are misinformed as to the nature of the oil being shipped through Enbridge’s pipelines. The thickest of the oil, which comes directly from the oil sands region of Alberta, is refined before it is shipped further. He admits the product is heavier than light sweet crude being pumped through Maine’s pipeline but not the kind of “dirty tar sand oil” environmentalists are conveying to the public.

“What we do is transmission pipelines,” White said. “When you put [oil sands] on a transmission line, it has to be processed. They’re tested for quality, to have all that sediment – sand, sediment, water, all those impurities that people generally associate with crude – removed before they can be flowed through the line.

“So it’s not an accurate image that these pipes are somehow taking up this raw bituminous material that is full of sand and clay and sediments and other impurities and that it’s being diluted and shoved through the line with heat and pressure to get it to its destination. That’s completely inaccurate. It is processed into a transportable crude that you can put on transmission lines, tested for quality by the producer and by us before it goes on the line. Every batch is tested, and then it’s sent along the line,” White added.

White takes issue with the phrase “tar sands,” as well.

“Tar is a man-made product so it’s not accurate to call them tar sands. Tar is not a naturally occurring substance whereas oil is. That’s why we call them oil sands. They call them tar sands because tar has a negative connotation in people’s minds so they’re trying to capitalize on that,” White said.

In response to the charges, Figdor responds: “Tar sands is the term first used by the industry to describe the almost coal-like oil. They are now trying to greenwash it, but there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s the heaviest and dirtiest oil on earth.”

Corrosive tactics

Figdor also doesn’t buy Enbridge’s efforts to assuage an alerted Maine public. She says Mainers are trying to stop what could be an environmental disaster in the making. She said Canada has an environmental review process that is nonexistent in the United States, save for a presidential permit, which President Obama has withheld in the case of the Keystone XL pipeline in the central United States.

“Essentially what’s being proposed here is that Maine is being used as a conduit to carry this highly corrosive oil,” Figdor said. “The pipeline crosses the Crooked River six times, which is the main tributary of Sebago Lake. And it comes within 1,000 feet of Sebago Lake. The risks are just enormous. The idea that we would allow this project to move forward, and without an environmental review, is extremely concerning and we’re going to do everything we can to stop it.”

Figdor says she doesn’t want the Crooked River to become another Kalamazoo River, 38 miles of which were polluted in summer 2010 by 1 million gallons of spilled Enbridge heavy crude oil. She says the Michigan spill was caused by corrosion in the pipeline caused by increased friction by tar sands oil. She said the disaster could be repeated along the Maine pipeline, which is 62 years old.

When asked about the Kalamazoo spill, White said the U.S.-based National Transportation Safety Board has just submitted a final report that determined the cause of the spill.

“The NTSB final report, also available to anyone online, has a tremendous amount of detail on exactly what happened in every stage in that incident,” White said. “The cause is quite definitive. It was caused by external corrosion on the line … The report clearly states that internal corrosion was not a factor in this incident. And this line had been transporting heavy oil for decades, and yet even the NTSB, which is an objective party on the analysis of this, said internal corrosion was not a factor. And that there were no internal corrosion features on the line.”

The external corrosion was caused by geographical factors, which the company should have been aware of, White went on to say. He said in-line inspection reports should have caught the problem, but failed to do so. He said company inspection procedures have undergone major changes since the spill. However, Figdor said the jury is still out on the true cause of the major spill.

“The NTSB did not specifically address ways in which the unique risks of tar sands contributed to the spill and the severity of its impact, but the panel presented several conclusions which implicate tar sands, including the pipeline’s failure was in part due to external corrosion which combined with stress corrosion cracking, led to a pipeline failure,” Figdor said. “We’ve discussed for some time how the higher temperatures of tar sands can speed corrosion while pressure variations that can occur in viscous, or thick, tar sands can contribute to cyclic pipeline stress.”

White says his company and others feel environmentalists are using scare tactics with residents in Maine, as they meet to hold public forums around Portland, the Lakes Region and western Maine. He said they target pipeline companies since they’re easy prey. Producers are hard to picket since “it’s like going to a factory town and saying you don’t like the factory,” White said. End-users – those who drive cars or fly in airplanes that use oil products – are also unwise targets since they are potential donors to the environmental groups.

“Going after pipeline companies is effective from their point of view because you can mobilize people within specific regions from a grassroots perspective and cut off the lifelines. So we’re very much being targeted in that sense,” White said. “We welcome scrutiny absolutely, but when basic fundamentals of the industry and how we operate are being misrepresented for what we feel are alarmist reasons, that is making people afraid unnecessarily, and that is what we have an issue with.”

Figdor didn’t comment on White’s allegations that groups are trying to scare the public, but focused on the pipeline companies’ unwillingness to discuss long-range plans.

“We’re working to protect Sebago Lake, Casco Bay, other Maine waterways, and our climate from the dangers of tar sands oil,” Figdor said. “We think the companies behind this project should come clean and tell the public their real plans to use Maine as a conduit for the dirty oil. It’s outrageous that they would try to keep the project, which holds such enormous risks for Maine and no benefits whatsoever, away from public scrutiny by breaking up the project into parts and pursuing approval for it in a piecemeal fashion.”