1267 "Flammable" placard on a tanker car
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Last week, a Montana
pipeline operated by Bridger Pipeline LLC broke and leaked roughly 50,000
gallons of crude oil into the partially frozen Yellowstone River over the
course of about an hour. In 2011, and
Exxon Mobil pipeline spilled 63,000 gallons into the same river.[1] The Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and subsequent
leak into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 has embedded itself in our collective
memory as the defining environmental disaster of recent years, an Exxon Valdez
for my generation. With continued
transport of petroleum products by pipeline (and with no end in sight), spills and
leaks will remain periodic and sadly expected events. The alternative method of transporting crude oil
is via rail, and has its own associated risks.
The Lac Megantic train derailment in 2013 caused a massive explosion
that killed 42 people in the town and another 2,000 were evacuated due to the
danger posed by fires, leaks and fumes.[2]
Disasters such as this become especially pressing when they happen
close to home. On October 10th,
2007, a train derailment occurred across the street from my house on a set of
CSX tracks in Painesville, Ohio. Dozens
of cars derailed and many burned ferociously until firefighter crews managed to
put them out. I distinctly remember
seeing the smoke plume from my house after school that day. Several cars were carrying petroleum products
(not crude). This all happened within
mere hundreds of feet from a Lubrizol chemical plant.[3] My older brother who now works for Lubrizol
at their pilot plant in Wickliffe told me that a major disaster could have
occurred had the derailment happened at the plant, which houses many extremely
toxic liquids and gasses, both as finished products and chemical intermediaries
for different manufacturing processes.
He estimates that certain chemical leaks could have easily left
thousands of people dead.
While both pipeline operators and locomotive companies will
continually point to what they deem the relative safety of their services, the
choice of one over the other amounts to being damned if we do, damned if we don’t. Neither option is truly safe, and despite
their claims of consistency, the disasters that do happen are so egregious that
their track record becomes nullified.
Many of them go criminally under-reported as well.[4] Recently, railroad interest groups and
industry councils have been touting the reliability of their services to
attract customers. This industry has
seen a huge surge in patronage by the crude oil industry due to the recent
influx of “fracked” shale oil and gas, many sources of which are new and
therefore lacking the pipeline infrastructure of historically common drilling
and refinery sites. While the railroads
do offer more market flexibility for their customers and a lesser spill rate
than pipelines (2.2 gal. per mil. ton-mi. vs. 6.3)[5],
their associated risks often endanger the general public (e.g. Lac Megantic and
the Painesville CSX crash) and still cannot guarantee absolute safety and
reliability. As the use of coal (almost
exclusively transported by rail) for electricity generation decreases
domestically (currently shipped at volumes lower than the past 20 years)[6],
it’s not hard to see why the railroad industry would push so hard to attract
crude extractors as customers. In this
market battle, the public, the environment and a sustainable economic future
lose out regardless of who comes out on top.
[1] http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/01/19/3612952/montana-yellowstone-river-oil-spill/
[2] http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/17/3056321/year-fossil-fuel-disasters/
[3] http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2007/10/train_wrecks_in_painesville.html
[4] http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/17/3056321/year-fossil-fuel-disasters/
[5], 6 “Moving Crude Oil by Rail,” Association of
American Railroads, Dec. 2013
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