Oil pipeline plans private
Source: ArgusLeader.com, by Steve Young and Jeff Martin
June 11, 2007
Keystone secrecy topic of PUC meeting Tuesday
Developers of the Keystone oil pipeline planned for eastern South Dakota have requested that many of the plans it has submitted to the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission be kept confidential.
Such secrecy will be a topic of a PUC meeting Tuesday in Pierre.
Among items now being kept confidential by the PUC at the request of developers:
- "Keystone Pipeline Project - Description Plan"
- "Update Keystone Pipeline Project - Description Plan"
- "Pipeline Risk Assessment and Environmental Analysis"
- "Emergency Response Plan"
PUC Chairman Dusty Johnson said it's not unusual for companies to request confidentiality.
"We deal with that all the time," he said. "Like telephone companies, whether they're talking about marketing plans or infrastructure, they'll ask for confidentiality. They don't want their competitors to know where they're putting cell phone towers, or information on a high-speed product they may be introducing."
But Johnson said there are few exceptions where material should be kept confidential, unless it involves trade secrets. Tuesday, the commission will go through each file submitted by TransCanada and determine whether it should be made public.
"I think it's important for this commission to make available to the public as much of this as we can," Johnson said. "This project affects thousands of South Dakotans."
The Keystone pipeline is a plan by utility giant TransCanada, based in Calgary, to send 435,000 barrels of crude oil per day by 2009 under South Dakota. The oil would move through a 30-inch pipe pressurized at 1,400 pounds per square inch.
The length of the pipeline in South Dakota will be about 220 miles and will cross Marshall, Day, Clark, Beadle, Kingsbury, Miner, Hanson, McCook, Hutchinson and Yankton counties. Four pump stations would be located in Day, Beadle, Miner and Hutchinson counties.
Trade secrets don't apply to TransCanada's documents, said Jeff Rauh, a project representative in Elm Grove, Wis. But TransCanada is required to not disclose information, such as endangered and threatened species and maps of environmentally sensitive areas, received from government sources, he said.
"In sharing that information with us, government bodies that control it require that we keep it confidential," Rauh said.
With endangered species, concerns might exist on potential human involvement or improvement of an area that's sensitive, he said.
When TransCanada officials filed paperwork on the pipeline with the PUC online, there were limits on file size, so more pieces of information ended up being marked confidential than intended, he said.
"We don't believe they all need to be confidential," Rauh said. "Instead of a whole document, it might be a partial document marked confidential or the entire document can be reclassified if possible."
Curt Hohn, general manager of the WEB Water Development Association in northeastern South Dakota and North Dakota, suggests the documents should have been made public before this hearing.
That's especially significant because the PUC's public hearings begin June 25 - only 13 days after Tuesday's hearing, said Hohn, who worries about how a pipeline leak could affect the environment and, potentially, his water system.
"If you're a landowner or water entity like WEB ... how are you going to testify at a hearing on the 25th when on the 12th, you're fighting to get a chance to look at documents?" Hohn said.
"The PUC staff tells me TransCanada has the right to declare things confidential," he continued. "So a company can come in from out of state, out of this country, without telling us what its crude oil is composed of, or what chemicals are in it? Apparently, they can."
In the past two weeks, about two dozen people and entities have applied for what is called "party status," which would allow them to intervene in Keystone's permitting process, Johnson said.
He suspects many who have applied for the status just want to make comments to the commission, which they also can do during public hearings June 25-27.
Johnson said some people might think the hearings are the end of the process, but that isn't so. "We can take up to a year to render this decision. It might not take that long, but it will take far past June, and many, many more months."
Reporter Melanie Brandert contributed to this report. Reach reporter Steve Young at 331-2306 and local news editor Jeff Martin at 331-2373.
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