Is oil transport by rail a safe, viable alternative if Keystone XL is rejected?

TORONTO – The Keystone XL pipeline may be one step closer to being built, but new emphasis is being placed on rail transport of oil as an alternative. While U.S. research suggests pipelines are safer, both methods come with their own set of risks.

TransCanada cleared a major hurdle Friday in its bid to win U.S. President Barack Obama’s approval for the Keystone XL pipeline. The State Department gave its blessing to the proposed route from Alberta to the Gulf Coast refineries, but suggested rail transport could provide more than enough energy for the U.S., whether or not the pipeline is built.

So how will safety play into the decision?

In June, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research released a paper called “Pipelines are safest for transportation of oil and gas.”

Using data from the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration Office (PHMSA) from 1992-2011, the report concluded that pipelines cause fewer deaths, injuries and environmental damage than road and rail.

“If safety and environmental damages in the transportation of oil and gas were proportionate to the volume of shipments, one would expect the vast majority of damages to occur on pipelines,” according to the report. “This paper finds the exact opposite. The majority of incidents occur on road and rail.”

The report lists the average Hazmat incidents per billion ton miles of oil (tons of oil by miles shipped) shipped per year as follows:

-rail had the highest rate of incidents at 651 per billion ton miles per year
-road at 20 per billion ton miles per year
-natural gas transmission pipeline at 0.89 per billion ton miles
-oil products via hazardous liquid pipeline were the safest at 0.61 serious incidents per billion ton miles

What the report’s comparisons don’t specify is how much oil was spilled in each incident.

Warren Mabee, director of Queen’s University’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy, says the report is correct to say that pipelines are safer than other forms of transport.

“Pipelines are clearly the best option when it comes to crude oil,” he wrote in an email to Global News.

Scale of spills

Mabee says that doesn’t change the fact that pipeline spills can be much larger than those associated with train or truck shipments.

“The Kalamazoo spill…was about 31.8 thousand barrels,” added Mabee. “This is huge and difficult to manage, and even if it only happens once every decade, these remain problematic for the companies.”

Mabee suggests the pipeline spill along the Kalamazoo River in Michigan was closer to a tanker spill in scale, noting 1989’s Exxon Valdez incident was 225,000-750,000 barrels. This is much larger than what’s contained in an oil tank car in a train, which he suggests would be about 318 barrels.

Pembina Institute Senior Policy Analyst Nathan Lemphers puts a typical rail car oil volume a bit higher, at about 500-600 barrels of oil, but agrees on the scale of spills.

“You would need a massive train derailment to equal a large-scale spill in a pipeline,” he said.

Spill detection

Lemphers highlights Canada’s smaller population and the fact that many pipelines operate in remote regions. With no land owners watching, it can take longer to detect spills.

“The major Plains Midstream spill of 28,000 barrels of oil in Northern Alberta-that was detected from another company flying over,” said Lemphers. “Enbridge had a spill near Norman Wells, N.W.T. that had a pinhole leak that was leaking for several months that was found by local hunters.”

He adds that even with leak detection systems, it’s taken companies like Enbridge 17 hours to shut down a pipeline in the past, even with alarms going off.

“There’s different risks for shipping oil by rail versus pipeline,” said Lemphers. “You can’t say one bar none is safer than the other.”

Volume

But Lemphers points to other problems associated with what he described as the U.S. State Department’s “bullish” assertion that “even if no pipelines would to be approved into the future, rail could handle next to all of the production increases expected from the oil sands.”

He calls the State Department’s assumption that there’s an infinite supply of rail cars and available rail lines “overly optimistic.”

“When you look at those production curves, they’re massive,” said Lemphers. “They call for a tripling of oil sands production by 2030…we haven’t seen that amount of oil travel by rail before.”

Emissions

Not to mention what he calls the elephant in the room: carbon emission from the oil sands.

“You could ship it by rail, or you could ship it by pipeline or tanker, and green house gases emissions would change a little, but they’re still considerable compared to other sources of crude oil,” he said. “They’re pushing Canada in the wrong direction when it comes to being able to meet our climate commitments.”

Lemphers says approving a pipeline like Keystone XL means 830,000 barrels – “equivalent to 36 per cent of current oil sands production.”

“If you approve that, that’ll necessarily mean that you’re going to have more greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 4.6 million cars on the road,” he said. “So if you scale up rail, it will take a long time to reach similar volumes as Keystone XL.”