Natural gas and oil transporters face relentless public pressure to cut leaks and pollution to zero across their North American network, experts said Wednesday at the 2018 International Pipeline Conference in Calgary.

“You’ve got more money than God,” Pipeline Safety Trust executive director Carl Weiner said in describing popular attitudes that drive demand for industry performance improvements.

He added that the forces for change include his group, which was born of citizens’ reactions to a 1999 explosion in Bellingham, WA, and used a $4 million endowment drawn from fines on the company at fault to evolve into a fixture of American pipeline development.

Trust surveys detect an annual average of 300 significant pipeline incidents in the United States, Weiner said. Investigations reveal that the hardware and behavior of the industry could fix up to 70% of the mishaps, he added.

A “mindset shift” is required to perform up to the public’s expectations, said Enbridge Inc. Vice President Andy Drake. Pipelines face heightened scrutiny and distrust akin to ordeals that transformed other industries from healthcare to petrochemicals, Drake said.

“Grow a thick skin and don’t be defensive,” said National Energy Board (NEB) chairman Peter Watson. Regulatory agencies face demand for improvement in roles from project public consultations and hearings, to supervising industry operations and generating forecasts, he said.

“A thick skin is a requirement,” said Ian Anderson, who kept his job as president of Trans Mountain Pipeline to try finishing its hotly contested expansion project after the Canadian government bought the company for C$4.5 billion ($3.6 billion).

He described the regulatory and judicial ordeal of the C$7.4 billion ($5.9 billion) plan to triple capacity on the 1,150-kilometer (920-mile) oilsands export conduit across Alberta and British Columbia (BC) as a case history of recent pipeline evolution.

When preliminary construction started in 2007 and 2008 across national and BC parks in the Rocky Mountains, Trans Mountain encountered no protests, and its only contact with natives was positive, recalled Anderson.

“We won an environmental award,” he added. “We left the parks better than we found them,” undamaged and enriched with geographical and wildlife knowledge generated by project planning and construction.

But after the expansion grew into a 2013 application for construction across the rest of BC and Alberta, Trans Mountain ran into fervent native and environmental opposition and fought 18 court cases. A months-long additional project review began last week, with the NEB and federal cabinet following instructions in an Aug. 30 appellate verdict that set aside their regulatory and political approvals to date.

The 2013 application ushered both the NEB and pipelines into the social media era of high public “transparency expectation” by prompting the board’s first use of Twitter to report receiving and posting the documents, Anderson said.

Conflicts over Trans Mountain contributed to new strategies adopted by the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, he said. A performance improvement program called Integrity First courts public credibility. Economic and political acceptance are sought by reminders that fossil fuel-based prosperity is required to pay for the promised new energy era of renewable energy transition, decarbonization and electrification.

Zero accidents should be accepted as a realistic goal, said Howard Elliott, administrator of the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).

But “prescriptive regulation,” to micromanage industry by enacting government rules covering all details of operations, cannot fully clean up the midstream sector, he added.

Elliott urged pipelines to learn from improvements in other industries such as railways by providing “transparency” disclosure of commodity shipments and using counterparts to technology that enabled early detection and repair of steel track and freight car wheels.

Drake said his continent-spanning Enbridge pipeline network agrees. “It is not appropriate for us to take anything less than absolute ownership of our performance.”