Crude oil is moving around the world, around our country, around pristine wilderness, around our cities and towns. It’s going to keep moving, will undoubtedly increase during our new energy boom, so what is the safest way to move it?
The short answer is:
truck worse than train worse than pipeline worse than boat(
Oilprice.com). But that’s only for human death and property destruction. For the normalized amount of oil spilled, it’s
truck worse than pipeline worse than rail worse than boat (
Congressional Research Service). Different yet again is for environmental impact (dominated by impact to aquatic habitat), where it’s
boat worse than pipeline worse than truck worse than rail.
So it depends upon what your definition is for
worse. Is it death and destruction? Is it amount of oil released? Is it land area or water volume contaminated? Is it habitat destroyed? Is it CO2 emitted?
In both the United States and Canada, more crude oil, petroleum products, and natural gas are transported in pipelines than by all other modes combined, using the unit of ton-mile which is the number of tons shipped over number of miles (
The Fraser Institute).
In the U.S., 70% of crude oil and petroleum products are shipped by pipeline. 23% of oil shipments are on tankers and barges over water. Trucking only accounts for 4% of shipments, and rail for a mere 3%. In Canada, it’s even more lopsided. Almost all (97%) of natural gas and petroleum products are transported by pipelines (
Canadian Energy Pipeline Association).
Amid a North American energy boom and a lack of pipeline capacity, crude oil shipping on rail is suddenly increasing. The trains are getting bigger and towing more and more tanker cars. From 1975 to 2012, trains were shorter and spills were rare and small, with about half of those years having no spills above a few gallons (
EarthJustice.org). Then came 2013, in which more crude oil was spilled in U.S. rail incidents than was spilled in the previous thirty-seven years.
The question is: which is safest and which should we invest in most? Take two spills for comparison.
The Quebec train wreck last year killed 47 people and spilled 1.5 million gallons of crude onto land (
Bloomberg.com). The Enbridge pipeline rupture in 2010 spilled over a million gallons of similar crude into the Kalamazoo River but did not kill anyone (
Wikipedia).
Contamination of water is generally much worse for the environment than contamination of land as it spreads quickly over more area and impacts more species and habitat. But killing people makes a big difference. I don’t want to put a price tag on human life, but the Government has, and it’s about $8 million a person (
NYTimes).
So the Quebec train derailment cost over $400 million in human life, and will cost another $150 million or so for clean-up and rebuilding the town. The Enbridge pipeline cost no human lives but will cost about a billion dollars to clean-up and, like the Exxon Valdez, will never really succeed.
Note: using this value of $8 million a person, we 300 million Americans are worth $2.4 quadrillion, hmm…maybe not a good number. If we use our net value for America as a whole, about $75 trillion, divide by 300 million people, then the average value of a human life in America would be $250,000. So the Quebec train derailment cost less than $12 million in human life. Thus the danger of trying to gauge the value of a human life.
These are not easy questions and one’s vested interest has a great deal of sway in the answer. You really do need to pick your poison.
Like always, it will probably come down to money. And it won’t be about jobs (
Pipeline Jobs), regardless of which end of the spectrum you believe, because there just isn’t enough jobs to matter compared to the value of the oil itself and the refinery capacity. It’s simply cheaper and quicker to transport by pipeline than by rail or by truck. The difference in cost is about $50 billion a year for shipping via the Keystone versus rail, totally eclipsing any economic effect of jobs in either direction.
A rail tank car carries about 30,000 gallons (÷ 42 gallons/barrel = about 700 barrels). A train of 100 cars carries about 3 million gallons (70,000 barrels) and takes over 3 days to travel from Alberta to the Gulf Coast, about a million gallons per day. The Keystone will carry about 35 million gallons per day (830,000 barrels). This puts pressure on rail transport to get bigger and bigger, and include more cars per train, the very reason that crude oil train wrecks have dramatically increased lately.
The Congressional Research Service estimates that transporting crude oil by pipeline is cheaper than rail, about $5/barrel versus $10 to $15/barrel (
NYTimes.com). But rail is more flexible and has 140,000 miles of track in the United States compared to 57,000 miles of crude oil pipelines. Building rail terminals to handle loading and unloading is a lot cheaper, and less of a hassle, than building and permitting pipelines.
It isn’t acceptable to just say we shouldn’t be moving oil, because we will for the next decade or more, no matter what. So, keeping in mind the difference between death/damage to humans and damage to the environment, which would you choose?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesco...poison-for-crude-pipeline-rail-truck-or-boat/