Transporting crude oil by rail in Canada is 4.5 times more likely to result in a spill than moving it by pipeline, a non-partisan public policy think tank concluded in a new study.
Calgary-based Fraser Institute reported in its study, “Safety in the Transportation of Oil and Gas: Pipelines or Rail?” that both methods are fundamentally safe; however, rail introduces more risk than pipelines, and trucking poses more risk than rail.
If rail appears denigrated in the comparison, it may be a result of the pipeline industry’s remarkable safety record.
“A telling statistic comes from Natural Resources Canada,” said lead author Kenneth P. Green in a statement, “which notes that between 2011 and 2014, 99.999% of crude oil and petroleum products sent by federally regulated pipelines arrived at their destination safely.”
The study echoes the results of pipeline safety research in the U.S., including conclusions by the U.S. State Department in its evaluation of the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Citing the State Department report, Fraser Institute noted that it “concluded that moving the oil by non-pipeline means would result in more total releases and barrels released per year, while also emitting more CO2 emissions during transport.”
The State Department report acknowledged that pipeline incidents lead to a higher volume of spills than rail, but said that the difference was at least partly offset by the greater ability to recover oil following a pipeline occurrence.
Fraser’s data establishes that less than a cubic meter of oil is spilled in 73% of pipeline incidents, with 16% of incidents resulting in no spill at all.
A study performed for the Manhattan Institute showed that transport of oil by roadway resulted in 19.95 incidents per billion ton miles per year. Rail’s incident rate was 2.08 per billion ton miles, while pipelines averaged only 0.58 incidents per billion ton miles.
“In both Canada and the United States, rising oil and natural gas production necessitates the expansion of our transportation capacity,” Green said. “The decision of which mode of transport should be used is a simple one. It should be the safer one; it should be pipelines.”
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