Environmentalists may have cheered when President Biden pulled the plug on the Keystone XL pipeline, but his decision is sparking concerns of a greater calamity down the tracks as the risks associated with transporting Canadian crude oil by rail start to pile up.
“Biden is trying to be a ‘green’ hero, but if he truly cared about the environment, he would have left the pipeline in place,” South Dakota resident Pete Nestle told the Washington Examiner. “It’s a hell of a lot more dangerous to move oil by rail. It isn’t rocket science. What he did was purely political.”
As one of his first acts in office, Biden revoked a key permit for the cross-border venture with Canada.
If the plans had stayed in place, the Keystone XL pipeline would have carried Canadian crude oil from Alberta and Steele City, Nebraska. The pipeline would have connected two points of an existing pipeline, also called Keystone, which carries oil from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries.
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Construction of the extension began in 2020 after a decade of protests from environmental activists, Native Americans, and ranchers along its proposed route. They had raised concerns about climate change and argued underground oil spills could contaminate the land and pollute drinking water.
“The cancellation of the Keystone pipeline project was inevitable once the government changed,” Barry Prentice, University of Manitoba supply chain management professor and former director of the Transport Institute, said. “Despite its merits or drawbacks, it is now a deflated political football. This means that more crude will have to move by rail. The huge investments in the oil sands will not be abandoned, and the oil has to go somewhere.”
But now, some are saying the bigger risk is transporting hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil a day by rail and point to multiple train derailments in the last decade as well as other environmental hazards linked to spills. Crude is extremely toxic and can cause damage to the land, air, and water. It is also dangerous to animals and humans.
“If there is an oil leak with transporting the oil through a pipeline, all the dirt that is surrounding the pipe will absorb the oil and contain the spill,” Peter Bardeson, business manager for the Laborers, Local 620 union in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, told the Washington Examiner. “By rail cars, if there is a derailment, the oil runs everywhere on the surface. So just picture a tanker car derailment in the middle of small-town America … what an environmental disaster.”
In the United States, there are four ways to move oil and gas: pipeline, truck, rail, and boat. In the absence of more pipelines being built, Canadian companies such as Gibson Energy, Cenovus Energy, and Imperial Oil are turning to trains to move their products to U.S. refineries, which need the Canadian export to replace declining supplies from Mexico and Venezuela.
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But transporting so much crude puts pressure on the country’s rail system and increases the chances of derailment.
In December, seven train cars carrying crude oil derailed in Washington state, with five catching on fire and sending a large black plume of smoke into the sky, forcing residents to evacuate. Washington is home to five oil refineries and sees millions of gallons of crude move by train through the state each week, mostly coming from North Dakota and Canada.
In July 2013, a runaway train that had been left unattended derailed, spilling oil and catching fire in Quebec. Forty-seven people were killed, and 30 buildings burned in the town’s center. About 1.6 million gallons of oil were spilled. That same year, an oil train from North Dakota derailed and exploded near Aliceville, Alabama. There were no deaths, but an estimated 749,000 gallons of oil spilled from 26 tanker cars. In 2014, a 122-car Canadian National Railway train derailed in New Brunswick, Canada. Three cars containing propane and one transporting crude oil exploded after the derailment, creating a fire that burned for days.
Since then, there have been many more examples of trains derailing, spilling oil, and causing destruction across the U.S.
Using rail as the primary transport also creates more emissions than pipelines, with air pollution and greenhouse gases more than doubling the costs associated with pipelines, a joint 2017 study by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh found.
The study, the first-ever to compare the costs of air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and spills and accidents across rail and pipelines, found that “air pollution and greenhouse gas costs of shipping crude oil by rail are much larger than spill and accident costs.”
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For example, “Air pollution and greenhouse gas costs of moving a fully loaded 100-car train of crude oil from North Dakota to the Gulf Coast are about $150,000 and from North Dakota to the East Coast are $210,000. However, the air pollution and greenhouse gas costs of moving an equivalent amount of oil by pipeline to the Gulf Coast are $78,000. The total estimated air pollution and greenhouse gas damages for oil shipped by rail from North Dakota in 2014 exceed $420 million.”
