Oil by rail
Tompkins - Thursday, June 6 2013
by:Timothy W. Shire
Idealism, no matter what kind, is one of the forgivable virtues of humans. A good cause stirs the spirit and gives the believers a feeling of worth and accomplishment. The massive tar sands projects of north eastern Alberta have been a long time in developing and some conservations spotted issues with the whole concept from the get go, but by far, people who get branded as “tree huggers” have been flocking to the issue, passionately opposing the transportation of the production of what is essential synthetic crude.
The reality of this whole process seems to have been blurred and smeared as conservationists and environmentalists have realised that the planet is undergoing some dramatic changes and the consumption of hydrocarbons is pretty close to the cause of the impending disaster.
There was a time to oppose the oil sands development and that was before the world’s petroleum giants invested untold fortunes into this development. However, once something on the scale of these project is into full production, the time for protests are a complete and total waste of time. The oil sands project is in full production and is growing exponentially. It is quite remarkable that the oil companies invested so heavily without thinking through the need to move the production to market?
So what we have is that there is a huge lobby of environmentalists who have just discovered that the tar sands business is real and the oil companies have just discovered that to see a return on their investment, the production has to be moved to the market place. The conservations are about twenty year to late in their awareness and the oil producers are about four years behind in getting the infrastructure together to move the stuff.
North American oil processing was developed around the least expensive method of transportation and that is of course, using ocean tankers. They situated the processing refineries in the gulf of Mexico and built their distribution system outward from there. Now the oil sands can provide much lower cost crude oil (almost 40% lower in market price) but it is situated in the middle of the continent with no access to ocean tankers.
The solution is of course to construct a pipeline from the Fort McMurray area to move the product to the gulf refineries. This is the Keystone pipeline project which financially was needed to have been in place more than a year ago and there is no resolution of the problem in sight. America’s government is actually more of a non-government and is truly unable to govern the country and that synthetic crude is being drastically devalued because it can not get to market.
The second solution for the oil sands is to transport the crude to Kitimat on the British Columbia, coast to be picked up by tankers and delivered to what ever markets can be found. This is the Northern Gateway pipeline project and the government of British Columbia has announced it will not cooperate and let the project go ahead without getting a kickback on the transported product. British Columbia is pretty much forgetting how the rest of Canada attempts to deal with the province fairly, yet this action is actually unCanadian.
Now while all of this is being debated and dragged out with hearings and negotiations, there is a bold realty. The oil companies have a massive investment and one way or another, they are going to market their product.
What is happening since fall of 2012 is that there has been a gradual and incremental move to put that production in railway tank cars and move it to market. Almost complete unit trains of oil cars are moving across the prairie on branch rail lines like those through Tisdale and on both CN and CP main lines. Both CN and CP rail traffic, on all of their system is up considerably and a good portion of that traffic is oil tank cars. The pictures on this page were taken on Wednesday and that is fairly typical of train after train. CP’s main line has a train approximately every ten minutes twenty-four hours a day. As I write this I am looking out the front window of the motorhome watching just such a train roll by.
Now the question that needs to be thought through, is this a reasonable thing to be happening? Safety people say it is about even up a pipeline oil spill is very rare, but can be very large, rail derailment and content loss is always a definite risk, but the amount in any spill would always be relatively small by comparison. However, in terms of efficiency, the pipeline is very significantly more efficient. For me, the real issue is that we must never ever ignore reality.
Those who oppose the pipelines do so with their high minded environmentally based arguments. Now consider the environmental impact of these rolling pipelines called railways, would anyone sensibly argue that a pipeline is more harmful to the environment then this alternative. The bottom line is that those opposing the pipeline developments north, south, east and west, are by their action, doing immense damage to the air quality of this country and the planet.
