Oxnard Spill May Spur New Regulations

The disastrous break of a decades-old pipeline that spilled 84,000 gallons of oil in a wetlands area near Oxnard raises new questions about whether tougher maintenance and inspection standards should be set by regulatory agencies for aging oil fields, state officials said Tuesday.

“The old pipelines are a problem,” state Resources Agency Secretary Douglas Wheeler, a member of Gov. Pete Wilson’s Cabinet, said while monitoring the spill at McGrath State Beach. “The problem is that some of them are not subject to inspection for safety.”

State regulations do not require stress tests of low-pressure oil field pipelines such as the eight-inch steel pipe found leaking about 2,000 barrels of oil into an ecologically fragile coastal lake Christmas morning.

Wheeler said he may recommend that new standards be enacted if investigators find that the Oxnard break could have been avoided through corrosion inspections or regular stress tests. He said special attention might be given to old oil fields in coastal zones, where breaks imperil wetlands.

“Once you have the answer (to the cause of the Oxnard break), then you devise appropriate revisions of state regulations, so you have testing commensurate with risk,” Wheeler said.

Top officials at two agencies that monitor the safety of thousands of miles of oil pipelines in California said they also favor a tightening of inspection rules for large pipes in oil fields--where maintenance and inspection is now voluntary.

“There are a lot of fields in California approaching 60 or 80 years old, and there appears to be a need to have additional inspection and testing requirements,” said Kenneth P. Henderson, a top official in the oil and gas division of the state Department of Conservation. “The old pipelines are more at risk to be a problem.”

Henderson’s agency inspects oil field facilities annually, but is not empowered to force pressure tests of pipelines or require oil companies to inspect their lines regularly for leaks.

Chuck Samo, supervising engineer in the state fire marshal’s pipeline safety division, also said he favors tougher inspection rules for main crude oil-gathering and transfer lines within oil fields.

“If it’s a gathering line near a beach or in a sensitive environment, I think someone should inspect them,” Samo said. “They should be somehow regulated, either tested or replaced or whatever is needed.”

Samo’s agency, which is responsible for the safety of 7,500 miles of oil pipelines in California, enforces strict federal and state testing, anti-corrosion and safety rules on lines outside of oil field boundaries.

Samo said federal regulators--concerned about old lines--are now considering new rules to also force inspection of the low-pressure pipelines within oil fields.

“But who knows how long that will take?” he said.

Samo said a recent 10-year study by his agency of oil pipeline ruptures found that 59% of California’s average of 53 non-oil field pipeline breaks a year are caused by corrosion. The incidence of rupture is much higher in older lines, he said.

The cause of the Oxnard break has not been determined. But state officials said the line, which Wheeler said is 30 to 40 years old, most likely ruptured due to corrosion and old age. The oil field containing the broken line was discovered in 1947, officials said.

Samo added that pipeline corrosion is much more prevalent in wet areas such as coastal zones.

The attorney for the lead state agency probing the Oxnard pipeline spill--Ventura County’s largest in decades--also said he thinks that pipeline breaks are a big problem statewide.

“The majority of spills we’ve responded to in the last two years have been pipelines,” said Stephen Sawyer, staff counsel for the state Department of Fish and Game’s special oil spill prevention and response unit. “Pipelines have become our major focus.”

Officials at Bush Oil Co., which owns the ruptured Oxnard pipeline, and state and federal investigators have refused to discuss their inquiry into the cause of the break.

But Terri Covington, spokeswoman at the Western States Petroleum Assn. office in Santa Barbara, said state officials should not allow the spill to cloud their view of which regulations are effective and truly needed.

“I hope we don’t get into a posture where a single incident drives policy for an entire industry,” she said.

Regulations prompted by the spill of millions of gallons of oil from the Exxon Valdez supertanker in 1989 are examples of how changes can be ineffective and expensive, she said.

“If there’s a lesson the industry can learn from this, fine,” Covington said. “But let’s not rush to jump off the cliff. . . . It’s quite possible that current regulations work fine 99.9% of the time.”

Covington said oil pipelines--on and off oil fields--are extraordinarily safe compared to alternatives, an assertion supported by hard numbers.

A federal study showed that over a four-year period in the 1980s, moving petroleum by pipeline was about 50 times safer than moving it by truck and 135 times safer than by rail.

Covington also said the oil industry routinely tests oil field pipelines to ensure their soundness even though such tests are not required by law.

Henderson, whose state agency oversees oil field facilities, agreed that companies already do periodic tests.

“But maybe a state agency should be there to witness those tests,” he said.

Whether high-pressure tests would have exposed the weakness in the ruptured Oxnard line is unclear.

Wheeler said Bush Oil officials told him Tuesday that the company performed high-pressure tests on the now-ruptured pipeline before Bush bought the Oxnard field from Chevron USA in 1990.

Company officials said that test was under pressures of 550 to 650 pounds per square inch, Wheeler said.

That compares to the much lower pressures--between 130 and 250 pounds per square inch--under which the pipeline was operated, state officials have said.

In addition, Bush Oil officials have said they tested the line early this year and administer such tests annually even though they are not required, Henderson said.

Henderson said his department has no record of leaks at the field during the 3 1/2 years that Bush has owned the facilities or since January, 1986, under Chevron USA.

Covington said the issue of increased inspection of oil field pipelines has become a favorite topic among local governments nationwide.

“Almost every county is looking at this issue,” she said. “They’re asking, ‘How many miles of pipeline do we have, what is it carrying and how old is it?’ ”

The issue has come to a head because large oil companies are turning over old, low-producing oil fields to much smaller companies with less money for maintenance, Covington said.

“The agencies with jurisdiction want to make sure there are (still) proper protections,” she said.

In Ventura County, where oil was originally discovered during the Civil War and where the oil industry boomed after World War I, small companies such as Bush Oil have taken over a number of fields previously operated by giant international companies.

Yet the county’s 37 oil fields--and its thousands of miles of pipelines on them--have had relatively few major leaks or spills, state officials said.

Records provided by the state division of oil and gas show that over the last two years, there have been six leaks in Ventura County of so-called gathering or shipping pipelines--the large lines that probably would be tested under stricter state regulations.

The spillage in those incidents totaled 128 barrels.

The total amount of oil spilled since 1986 at the county’s oil fields is about 8,200 barrels, not counting the 2,000 last week, according to state records.

Those spills were from leaks of all types, including those from pipelines, storage tanks, oil wells and pump malfunctions.

County oil fields produced 11.8 million barrels of oil in 1992, records show.

* CLEANUP CONTINUES: B1