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Imperial Oil is asking to delay regulatory proceedings related to major repair work at its Norman Wells site.
The company says the timeline for an environmental assessment of its Line 490 repair project will mean 2027 is the next realistic window for the work to take place.
As a result, Imperial is asking for that assessment to be pushed back until the end of 2025 so it can focus on another, broader assessment of its entire Norman Wells facility.
A third assessment, of Imperial’s plans to close the Norman Wells site in the next five to 10 years, is also expected to begin in the near future.
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In a formal request to the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board on May 1, Imperial said the Line 490 assessment should be adjourned until the last quarter of 2025 rather than going ahead later this month.
“Imperial would now need all authorizations for Line 490 by October 2025 so that planning decisions with respect to matters such as final engineering, procurement, logistics and mobilization work could be made to meet the 2026 construction window,” the company wrote.
“It appears increasingly unlikely that Imperial will obtain the necessary regulatory certainty to properly plan for and meet the available 2026 construction window. In light of this information, Imperial now considers that the next viable construction window for Line 490 will be in 2027.”
Pushing back the work until 2027 will keep a significant portion of the Norman Wells oil field offline.
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The Line 490 project is designed to reopen an area of the site that has been off-limits for production since some pipes failed in 2022.
Imperial is proposing to replace various pipes between Mackenzie River islands using a technique called horizontal directional drilling, or HDD. A tunnel would be dug under the river and then a pipeline pulled through the tunnel.
The Sahtu Secretariat referred that plan to environmental assessment in September last year, saying HDD represented “unique, novel and unusual” technology that, combined with “a continually changing river environment” along the Mackenzie River, necessitated close scrutiny.
In recent days, the Gwich’in Tribal Council and Délı̨nę Renewable Resources Council, or Délı̨nę Ɂehdzo Got’ı̨nę, have also filed questions related to concerns they have about the work.
The review board, meanwhile, says it has been approached by the NWT government over concerns about the “scope and number of information requests” – or questions – being filed regarding Line 490.
According to the review board, the GNWT “brought forward concerns that there were potentially many information requests in the Line 490 environmental assessment that could be interpreted as outside of the scope of the environmental assessment or not relevant to the proceeding.”
The review board said Imperial had been given an opportunity to raise the same concern itself, but had chosen not to do so.
The board must now decide whether to accept Imperial’s request for a delay.
