Oil by rail may not be nearly as dangerous as it is portrayed.
In fact, one group is arguing that this time-tested mode of transport is actually safer than pipelines.
The Railway Association of Canada has released an analysis that crunches leakage and accident statistics differently than other studies and concludes “that railways provide the safer alternative.”
Although this may come as a shock to a country still recovering from the Lac-Mégantic disaster of 2013, the overall statistics tell an interesting story.
Here’s how the report did it. Most studies, such as this one, compare “incident rates,” which uses a mathematical formula based on how many separate releases of oil each mode of transport experiences. The railway association study, however, looked at the “spill rate” – looking at the volume of oil released.
The paper argues that the incident rate for both modes of transport are quite small. There were, on average, just 0.2 incidents per billion gallon-miles in 2012 and 2014.
Spill rates tell a different story. From 2014 to 2014, the study says, more than six million gallons of oil were spilled by pipelines and just 148,000 gallons by rail (albeit transporting less product overall). The study calculates the pipeline spill rate at 24.3 and rail at 11.9.
Crude oil production has grown by leaps and bounds, it notes. Between 2004 and 2009, it grew on average at just 1.2 per cent per year. Between 2009 and 2014, it grew an average of 6.8 per cent per year, from 41.4 billion gallons to 57.5 billion gallons annually.
At same time, so has the use of rail as a means of transport – from less than 6,000 carloads before 2012 to nearly triple that by 2014, or 15 per cent of all Canadian crude oil.
The report concludes that both railways and pipelines have taken means to improve oil transport safety and spill monitoring.