Oil pipelines do one thing - transport oil. Not water, not milk, not corn syrup. Just oil.
Rail can transport anything. Containers, tankers, even rocket booster segments.
Yes, we're absolutely taking a short term hit, but investing in general purpose infrastructure that can be adapted for new technology and demands is a good thing. The continental rail network started off with coal powered steam trains, then diesel, now diesel-electric and even some pure electric locomotives. Maybe this century it will evolve past fossil fuels as well.
So yes, cancel the pipeline, but in its place invest in the safety and reliability of rail networks.
Let alone the cost of employing all the union railway workers, maintenance crews, technicians, etc and the footprint of the trains themselves operating.
There's a reason pipelines exist, and that is in their simplicity of transporting the product efficiently. Sure they can't transport anything else, but I don't think too many rocket boosters would be traveling to remote areas in Canada.
In the context of a discussion about what method of delivering oil is more efficient, wasting resources on employing people for unnecessary tasks does not have enormous benefits. From a society point of view, if the goal is to deliver oil, then it is a societal loss to do it inefficiently just to pay more people.
If the goal is to pay people, then just pay people, no need to do it in a roundabout way of forcing an inefficiency into the system.
> wasting resources on employing people for unnecessary tasks does not have enormous benefits
Agreed, but that assumes perfect knowledge by business owners of what is most efficient.
I think business owners often lean much too far toward seeing labor as a commodity and an expense, to be minimized. Another approach is to see humans as the most powerful parts of the organization, and to invest in and empower them.
I'm speaking in the abstract; of course it's not always the case that more investment in labor is better. But there is a history of it: For example (and this is more a legend than something I have details on), back in the 1980s American auto companies had long treated workers as commodities. Toyota was far more successful by empowering them; famously, any worker could stop the assembly line.
Then lets pay everyone well to dig holes in their backyard and fill them in.
Employing people is great gain only if they do something productive. If you can employ less people that is greater gain because those others can do something else useful.
Paying people well is very negative for the environment.
A poorly paid person will have a smaller car, smaller house, use less electricity and gas, and throw away far less trash.
In fact, wealth is very strongly correlated to environmental impact. Sure, rich people might be buying electric cars and recyclable coffee cups, but it nowhere near offsets the bigger house with A/C...
Used nuclear material is not capable of killing everyone in an accident, nowhere close. More people have died drilling for and refining oil than have died in nuclear accidents, and that’s before we consider the existential risk that global warming poses.
Studies from a New Mexico mine ending in the 1970s estimated an extra 62.4 deaths per 100,000 miners. That’s a lot, but it doesn’t even hold a candle to coal mining in the same era. In 1970 the coal mining fatality rate in the US was 960 per 100,000 (1,388 fatalities for 144,480 miners).
Secondly, most uranium is leeched from the ground, not strip mined. This is far safer for the worker, although it does pose other safety considerations for the community.
Third, we can change these things. Coal mining has gone from ~900 per 100,000 workers to ~24 per 100,000 workers. Workplace health and safety standards are a choice we can make as a society. If we can make coal mining safer, there’s no reason we can’t make uranium mining safer.
The estimate is that nuclear kills 0.04 people per TWh produced. This includes mining, refining, and the construction and operation of nuclear power plants. Natural gas kills about 4 people per TWh produced, making it far more lethal than nuclear all considered.
Fascinating in a grim way, rooftop solar is actually more lethal than nuclear, at 0.44 per TWh. Quite literally more people have died falling off roofs installing solar panels than died at Chernobyl. With rooftop being such a minuscule percentage of global production, expect that number to change.
By and far the most lethal is coal. The world average is 161 per TWh. But that average is hiding a lot of nastiness, because the true range is between 15 (US) and 278 (China). Quite literally millions of people die each year due to pollution, most of them because of coal.
This is a classic case of how people don’t calculate risk correctly. Nuclear accidents are scary, rare things and so people focus in on them. But in trying to get rid of nuclear we’ve ended up shifting primarily to coal and natural gas, energy sources that kill multiple orders of magnitude more people than nuclear does. But because these people die one at a time in hospitals, we end up missing the scale of the tragedy as a society.
> But the solution here is obvious; stop using oil.
Sure, but will we see rail transportation of oil blocked in a similar manner? Otherwise we might just be making our current uses of oil less safe and efficient for nothing.
I think this needs to be achieved some other way, like through carbon taxes, not by blocking pipelines.
> But the solution here is obvious; stop using oil
> Sure, but will we see rail transportation of oil blocked in a similar manner? Otherwise we might just be making our current uses of oil less safe and efficient for nothing.
No, we won’t see our rail transit of oil blocked because it should not exist. The oil should be left in the ground.
I don't understand what you are proposing here. In terms of actions that we take to curb the use of oil, I am saying those actions should not unfairly discriminate against pipelines vs less safe transports like trains. If we take steps to block pipelines, we should take steps to block oil trains too.
Obviously if we could just snap our fingers and eliminate all dependence on oil, that would be fine since it would eliminate pipelines and oil trains together. But in lieu of that, we need to make choices about how to maximize the efficiency and safety of the oil we do use. Pipelines in some cases might actually be a good way to do that.
It's not possible to both maximize the safety and efficacy of using oil while externalizing the long term economic and environmental impact of using oil. The proposed efficiency and safety are entirety predicated on the externalized impact of pollution, climate change, and oil sand fracking.
What's the problem with keeping the more effective technology (pipelines) and instead using taxes to disincentivize the externalities? Wouldn't that be better for everyone?
I am not saying we should make oil cheaper. That is the point of the taxes. We should be raising the price through taxes, not by blocking the state of the art technologies.
> But in lieu of that, we need to make choices about how to maximize the efficiency and safety of the oil we do use. Pipelines in some cases might actually be a good way to do that.
Pipelines make oil cheaper and safer, which is the exact opposite of what we need as a species. This both delays transition to cleaner technologies, and it causes even more consumption among those who already use it. People’s consumption of oil is primarily limited by their financial ability; making oil cheaper usually results in them spending the same amount to consume more.
If I had my druthers, I’d fight any expansion of oil exploration, drilling, and transit tooth and nail. At this point drilling for more of it is like continually ordering pizza and swearing that the diet starts tomorrow.
It would not delay transition to cleaner technologies if you take action to price in the externalities through taxes. Then, we could have both safe and efficient oil, and it wouldn't increase consumption. That is the best outcome for everyone.
Blocking new technologies is a bad solution because it only achieves the second part, limiting increases in consumption. It doesn't allow us to take advantage of safety/efficiency improvements, unlike with carbon taxes where we could have both.
As it stands today, using local action and control to make new oil infrastructure painful and expensive to build is the best way for activists to raise the cost of oil and trim its consumption. This comes with obvious tradeoffs, rail transit is less safe, but it’s an available avenue given that the legislature is hopelessly corrupt and unwilling to do anything to curb oil consumption directly.
Stop using oil, yeah sure. This will just transfer consumption from the most ethical and environmentally sound jurisdiction in the world to the worst.
Ask the town in Quebec that had many people burned alive from a oil train derailment how safe it is.
The Lac-Mégantic rail disaster occurred in the town of Lac-Mégantic, in the Eastern Townships region of Quebec, Canada, at approximately 01:15 EDT,[1][2] on July 6, 2013, when an unattended 73-car freight train carrying Bakken Formation crude oil rolled down a 1.2% grade from Nantes and derailed downtown, resulting in the fire and explosion of multiple tank cars. Forty-seven people were killed.[3] More than 30 buildings in the town's centre, roughly half of the downtown area, were destroyed,[2][4] and all but three of the thirty-nine remaining downtown buildings had to be demolished due to petroleum contamination of the townsite.[5] Initial newspaper reports described a 1-kilometre (0.6 mi) blast radius.[6]
~ Wikipedia
1. Consumption is not moveable like that; you’re describing a process more akin to how manufacturing moves.
The world’s poorest people won’t suddenly be able to afford all this oil infrastructure if the richer nations stop consuming it. Especially if doing so reduces economies of scale.
2. From a global warming perspective, there is no such thing as an ethical jurisdiction to emit carbon from. Carbon is carbon, and it affects us all whether or not it comes with other forms of pollution.
I should have worded that better. I meant production, if you read it carefully I think it still implies that but I should have been more clear.
By ethical I mean human rights abuse, treatment of women and minorities. Why would you reward Saudi Arabia, Iran and so on and punish a place like Western Canada?
The issue is that there is a fixed supply of oil, and every drop that we pull out brings our species closer to extinction. I’d rather not reward Saudi, but I’d much more prefer to halt production of oil ASAP.
What are you basing this off of? Climate models that can't pass back testing with historical data when they are started 5,10,20,30 years ago. Sea level rise the last 150 years has been between 1-3mm a year and rising since the end of the last ice age (24k years). Food production continues to rise, the planet is greener. Extreme weather events are not increasing. The winters in North America have slightly warmed the past 30 years. Less area burned every year. Humans will adapt just fine. I'll source all this later if you really want?
Much of the opposition to pipelines is their propensity to fail. There are many, many pipelines in various states of neglect and failure. With no plans or resources to fix them. We don't even monitor most of them.
We should be decommissioning pipelines, not building new ones.
> Oil is spilled at a significantly higher rate when transported by rail.
That doesn't seem to be correct. Maybe you mean spill incidence is higher when transported by rail? Table 9: https://imgur.com/a/3uIKVZc -- this makes it very clear that total volume spilled and volume spilled per incident is far greater from pipelines.
FWIW this table is from a paper that is trying to argue that pipelines are safer. But they quantify safety with the metric "how many people get hurt." In making that argument they make statements like: "The majority of incidents occur on road and rail." << duh, people are usually not around when pipelines spill. Also driving is hazardous.
Also rail cars and vehicles are monitored, whereas long pipelines are not so easily monitored; some spills may not even be detected for a long time. Related physics explaining a little bit of why long pipelines are hard to build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msxMRwQyXI8
No opinion on rail vs. pipeline transport, but I'll note that these two statements are not in disagreement:
> Oil is spilled at a significantly higher rate when transported by rail.
> total volume spilled and volume spilled per incident is far greater from pipelines.
The oil pipelines can spill more per incident, or spill more total volume in aggregate, yet still spill at a lower _rate_ if they transport a yet-larger volume of oil compared to trains.
I've noticed this on arguments for/against the Keystone pipeline: the exact same underlying numbers can be framed in terms of rates or amounts, depending on the motivation of the speaker.
In addition to more oil being spilled, rail lines transit through populated places while pipelines are routed away from them.
There's a rail line running right through the central business district of my town, and it's the primary route between Alberta and the Pacific ocean. I sure wish all that oil was travelling through a pipeline instead of my town.
because rail is used for things other than oil (the whole reason people in this thread say transporting oil by rail is better), and those things require it to be near populated places.
if you build a dedicated oil railway that doesn't go anywhere populated and just goes from the oilfield to the refinery, then you've reinvented a pipeline, but worse.
If you’re only going to use oil, it’s worse. But rail is much more flexible than a pipeline, and it can easily move food, people, garbage, and other various products that a society needs.
I'd say rail is worse, there is the safety issue, but also pollution (diesel exhaust emissions + carbon footprint), and noise pollution.. would much rather a pipeline going through my neighborhood than a railroad.
When the pipeline is working perfectly that may be true, but if it is spilling upstream of you and polluting your groundwater with hydrocarbons and you don't know until it's started to cause health issues because monitoring a long pipeline is hard...you might feel differently then.
The long tail risk is just higher when it comes to a pipeline.
Getting the pipeline route established is a pretty significant upfront cost. Easements, land purchases, agreements with all the various stakeholders are expensive. Even not reusing the existing oil pipeline, being able to repupose the corridor and corridor access points to lay a natural gas pipe or some other linear infrastructure is a pretty big deal.
Assuming you happen to have one of those products that need to move in the exact same place as oil once did, sure. But a lot of these pipelines go between wells and refineries or docks, a path useless for anything but oil.
> The continental rail network started off with coal powered steam trains, then diesel, now diesel-electric and even some pure electric locomotives.
The actual evolution process was wood-powered steam trains, then coal-powered steam, then electric, then diesel-electric.
Yes, in the US, several railroads electrified then deelectrified, because it turns out that (for freight at least) diesel-electrics get you most of the useful benefits of electric locomotives without all of the problems of having to string up electric catenary and worry about provisioning traction power stations for your 1000s of miles of mainline track.
There can be a substantial cost saving switching from diesel to electric fully.
India for example has been investing in this convertion last 2-3 years and are expecting 4-5 billion dollars savings every year by going full electric in the next 2 - 3 years.
The networks are very different , single public owner/lots of private owners , frieght/passenger ratios are different, Density is different etc,however there can be cost savings
Yes in India gets coal super cheap and they use a ton of it to make their electric. All these electric cars are just coal cars, all these electric trains are just coal trains
They are also building quite a bit of solar power. The obvious difference between actual coal trains and electric trains (even running on coal electricity), is that you don't need to change a thing in the trains themselves to reduce the emissions of the system. Certainly it would be nicer if India already generated their electricity carbon neutrally, but moving from coal powered electric trains to PV powered electric trains is so much easier than from diesel trains.
Sure, but most of Europe use electric and we generate a lot of our electricity from nuclear and hydro. By switching to electric India can change to other sources of electricity in the future.
It is in parallel to solar investments in station and on top of trains and along the tracks as well. My understanding is that they plan to go fully green.
Given the variations in solar generation and no mention of storage I am assuming it is equivalent green power to offset rather than actual used.
Keystone proposed to transported one thing - Canadian Oil to Canadian tankers. Outside of running the pipeline in the states, it would not impact US oil prices - outside of extra capacity which is heavily regulated to control price.
It’s arguably one of the least. Oil is not one thing, it’s a blend of hundreds or thousands of different compounds. There is a world of difference between light sweet crude and oil sands, and those are different from sour oil.
Some types of oil must be diluted with other types of oil can consume it, such as tar sands oil.
Being generic comes at a cost of doing everything less well. Sometimes that's the right trade off, but i'm not sure that's the right trade off here, especially when it comes to safety and envornment.
My understanding is that transporting oil by rail takes more energy (so more carbon), and if things go wrong, they go much worse than if things go wrong in a pipeline.
I think pipelines make sense as long as we are continuing to use oil. This particular pipeline project was pretty stupid though, and kenny's support of it was either gross incompetence or an indirect way to defraud tax payers.
Hydrogen would be a viable alternate use for the pipelines in the long term. There are some promising projects going on in Alberta for producing hydrogen in less carbon intensive ways.
Making a pipe leak tight to hydrogen versus leak tight to oil is not even playing in the same ballpark. Hydrogen leaks through practically everything, oil is viscous.
Plus hydrogen burns much more easily and the flame is transparent.
Atomic radius of helium is smaller than hydrogen 31 vs 53 pm. Hydrogen gas is also typically in the form H2, which is much larger. At the same time ofc oil pipelines will still be too leaky.
It seems it's hard to transport pressurized hydrogen in pipelines as hydrogen embrittles steel. Gas utilities are trying to implement this to lower the carbon footprint of their gas (when hydrogen comes from renewable sources).
> Rail can transport anything. Containers, tankers, even rocket booster segments.
While I get the idea and oppose oil infrastructure made possible by the greenhouse gas subsidy (i.e., that the gasses are dumped on the public), rail can't efficiently transport electricity. It's not infrastructure for low-carbon or zero-carbon energy (with some possible future exceptions).
Rail can transport electricity reasonably efficiently in the form of aluminium.
Find a place with abundant electricity. Ship aluminium ore there by rail. Smelt the stuff there with the cheap electricity. Ship the resulting aluminium back.
The end result is more energy efficient than using a power line to move the electricity to the aluminium ore.
Rail networks can be easily sabotaged, and therefore suck.
That's why the US for the most part uses trucks not trains.
Interestingly, the max-flow min-cut theorem was apparently developed as a way to find the best way to sabotage railroads (i.e.: how to cause to cause the most harm with the fewest "cuts" = sabotage).
Rail infra investment stopped after ww2 and never restarted. All of these railroad engine power train tech improvements may have happened, but the rails on ground infrastructure peaked in the 1950's .
Interstate highways also made most of the US accessable to heavy aircraft in case an emergency airport needed to be assembled on short notice. It's a network of runways. Interestingly, the German Autobahn has a lot more curves, but it's debatable if that is to make them harder to bomb or to keep drivers awake.
Also many US cities had full fledged local rail systems that were paved over to make way for roads and cars.
> Rail networks can be easily sabotaged, and therefore suck.
> That's why the US for the most part uses trucks not trains.
Do you mean, that's why the U.S. built infrastructure around interstate highways and not rail? Why did European countries and other places conclude differently?
Is there anything you can recommend reading about it? The more scholarly the better.
The fastest, most effective way to transition from fossil fuels is to limit their supply. Any parent knows you can read all you want about how to raise a child before it's born, but the real learning starts at birth. Within seconds you learn more than before when it was abstract.
Likewise, to learn to live without fossil fuels, shutting down supply will lead us to face the actual problems we have to solve, not theoretical. Obviously, don't shut everything all at once, and protect the helpless, hospitals, and necessary things.
Among the rest of us, no one will be injured. Entrepreneurs will innovate. Inconveniences will lead to learning and life improvement.
Decisions are trade offs. The cost of resources will become more scarce here. Which means the poor will pay more for their fuel prices. If you believe that no one will be injured, you are looking at level one impacts. Any decision needs to be looked at as a trade off.
Russia, China, India, and Iran must be so happy with the ways we shoot ourselves in the arm. Fracking moved us closer to getting away from the Middle East, but the pipeline cancellation, the fracking fights, and the anti-nuke efforts is forcing us to get closer to them.
Pipeline spills affect drinking water and ecology for US citizens. Fracking has externalities that again, can directly hurt our populace and ecosystems we live adjacent to. Nuclear is just hard to do right, and I for one am glad we are careful with where/when we deploy it.
I disagree with this framing that "we shoot ourselves in the arm." As a US citizen I think a better way to think of it is that we insist on proceeding with caution when it comes to diversifying our energy supply, and while in the short term we do have a dependence on foreign fossil fuels, there are certainly many efforts being made to reduce that. And many of these efforts don't involve looking for more non-renewable oil.
If you think of our energy supply as a long-running software service that can't go down, replacing foreign oil with fracking+local pipelines is like replacing old short term dependencies on new short-term dependencies that we pay maintenance cost on. Negative externalities must be factored into those cost decisions. Similarly nuclear is like building a very complex internal service that, if done right, will pay huge dividends, but if done wrong, can be quite catastrophic and expensive.
> As a US citizen I think a better way to think of it is that we insist on proceeding with caution
As others have pointed out, this isn't going to stop the oil from being pumped, as it is still economical (though less so, and dirtier) to move by train.
The keystone pipeline project has been thoroughly studied. All we have done is make sure that the Canadian oil field externalities are now even higher.
It is not at all unfair to call it foolishness rather than caution.
Caution in the case of Keystone XL is about potential spills, not the actual pumping of the oil. It's okay that oil is being pumped there, if the economic engine so demands. It's good that it's being transported by rail, because it's less likely to create an (additional) environmental catastrophe.
You might say it's dirtier to move the oil by train, I'd say it's responsible and a price worth paying to protect sensitive ecologies from inevitable pipeline leaks. You say externalities are higher, I say your worst case summed externalities are lower.
Surely the many efforts being made to reduce dependence on foreign fossil fuels all fall into the bucket of nuclear, fracking and small amounts of windmills/solar, but those can't make up the difference any time soon due to intermittency alone. So you seem to be saying you're against all the ways of reducing dependence on foreign fuels but are sure that dependency will be reduced.
> So you seem to be saying you're against all the ways of reducing dependence on foreign fuels but are sure that dependency will be reduced.
First of all, if foreign fossil fuels are a dependence, and we are striving to remove that dependence, it is worth considering what our new dependence will be on. Is it going to be on local fossil fuels, extracted at great cost to our own quality of life? I'd hope not. The global economy is already interconnected as hell, we don't need to be in such a rush that we make a bad decision rewiring our supply chains. We should implement a superior replacement first, and we're definitely in the R&D phase of that.
Secondly, I'm certainly not against all ways of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and I resent that you present it as a binary. Fracking and nuclear are cool technologies, but it's pretty damn important to scrutinize how and when they're being deployed. Slow is good in this case. I'm very against using "oh no we're dependent on foreign fossil fuels" as a rallying cry to avoid environmental due diligence and to ignore all the negative environmental externalities that occur from the realities of dirty energy. Like, building a long oil pipeline is not externality free. The physics of such an endeavor make it so that spills are basically unavoidable, and often difficult to find before damage is done to the long term health of ecosystems and humans.
In terms of "how will we remove our dirty energy dependence" at large, I think it's fair that nobody has a real answer yet. The problem is not "the US depends on dirty foreign fossil fuels" -- the problem is that "everyone depends on dirty fossil fuels." Most countries understand at some level that they need to fix this.
My money is on a combination of fixing the issues that prevent renewables (including wind/solar/geothermal) from making up the better part of our energy budget (and sure intermittency/storage is part of that story, though if you're that aware you must know that tons of innovation is happening in this space too right), and renewable fuels (hydrogen, ethanol, etc).
For just rearranging the US energy dependence graph there are potential solutions to be had that are cleaner than fracking like leaning harder on natural gas which is relatively plentiful here. It seems likely that we could do more nuclear, but when you get into the weeds of suitable nuclear sites the story isn't as optimistic as you might naively think. And again, nuclear is not as clean as folks might imagine.
In general I think it's dangerous to look at the picture and be like "okay looks like X, Y, and Z are the only solutions" ignoring the timescale over which you have to solve the problem, the metric by which you measure the gravity of the problem, the total cost of potential solutions including all enumerable externalities, and potential / ongoing technological advancements.
The most effective way to transition from fossil fuels is to make an alternative more economical.
For example, there is the “methanol economy”, in which solar or nuclear energy is used to create syngas from water and CO2. The syngas is then transformed into methanol or other higher energy density fuels. When they are burned, you get the CO2 and water back - it’s a closed cycle, like a battery in an electric car. But, it is practical for air transport propulsion.
But is the supply actually being limited? Won't a similar amount of fuel be transported via rail or trucks? What is the carbon footprint of transporting X kg of fuel over pipeline vs rail?
It seems to me that the main outcome is that the same amount of fuel is transported with a costlier (environmentally, and financial) vehicle.
Rail can transport anything. Containers, tankers, even rocket booster segments.
Yes, we're absolutely taking a short term hit, but investing in general purpose infrastructure that can be adapted for new technology and demands is a good thing. The continental rail network started off with coal powered steam trains, then diesel, now diesel-electric and even some pure electric locomotives. Maybe this century it will evolve past fossil fuels as well.
So yes, cancel the pipeline, but in its place invest in the safety and reliability of rail networks.