When my grandparents were able to buy their first house after World War II, it was only affordable because it was the tiniest house in the otherwise ritzy Toronto neighborhood of Rosedale – and because a railroad line cut right across the back of the garden. As a small child, I found this immensely exciting. When my grandmother’s china and glassware began to rattle in the cabinet, I knew I had plenty of time to race out to the rose bushes that grew along the wire fence to watch all the freight cars and oil tankers roll by, and then to wave at the man in the caboose.
As I grew older, the inability to continue a discussion over the dinner table, a telephone conversation or even get a clear picture on the television screen became irritants. But it wasn’t until the derailment of dozens of train cars carrying hazardous chemicals in Mississauga in 1979, forcing the evacuation of 200,000 of the Toronto suburb’s residents (the largest such North American exodus until Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans), that I realized that the contents of those tankers, sliding by almost close enough that I could touch them, could wreak havoc on a city neighborhood.
These days, not much freight of any kind travels on those lines, thanks to decades of pressure by activists in the aftermath of Mississauga. But the residents of the Quebec town of Lac-Megantic weren’t so lucky. The derailment there and the subsequent explosion of tank cars heading for an Atlantic Coast refinery is known (so far) to have claimed five lives and left some 40 other people missing without a trace.
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It’s an ugly yet timely reminder of the risks of transporting dangerous raw materials. Not surprisingly, perhaps, much of the commentary that has followed has focused on the battle between rail and pipeline: Which is less dangerous? That debate is largely irrelevant. Why? In part because, historically, both have proven to be very safe. And in part because, for today at least, there exists little choice, simply because the right pipeline networks don’t yet exist.
Meanwhile, the environmental lobby argues that we shouldn’t be tapping these new sources of oil and natural gas in the first place, since the mining technologies used to extract so-called heavy oil, and the “fracking” that enables the production of much new oil and gas from shale, are damaging. At present, hydro-electric and so-called renewable sources of power account for about 13 percent of electricity output in the United States; even many of the hybrid or all-electric cars that don’t rely on gasoline and thus don’t generate toxic emissions still rely indirectly on fossil fuels because they are electricity-dependent.
The fact remains: Our oil addiction is still strong. While U.S. consumption is down from its highs of 20.6 million barrels daily as recently as 2007, and dipped just below 19 million barrels daily in 2011, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, it remains at levels seen in the late 1990s.
Moreover, overall energy consumption continues to climb. Given that about 70 percent of the crude oil that we consume is in the form of gasoline and other transportation fuels, the odds of this changing rapidly are rather low. For now at least, it’s not about doing without oil, but deciding where we get it from, where we refine it and how we get it from point A to point B.
Right now, much of the additional oil that we’re finding happens to be located in inconvenient places where there is too little pipeline infrastructure in place to move it swiftly and efficiently to and away from refineries. Many existing refineries have been built along the coasts to deal with imported crude and offshore production. That’s the ugly reality. And that’s why the train that, tragically, turned downtown Lac-Megantic into a giant fireball was one of about ten that have gone through that village every month taking crude oil from North Dakota to Canada’s Atlantic provinces.
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Given the choice between transporting a flammable substance via trains and via pipelines, pipelines almost always will emerge as the better option, at least when it comes to safeguarding human lives from the kind of epic disaster that has befallen Lac-Megantic. Across the continent, rail infrastructure was built to link communities, and often runs through the center of cities as well as small towns: When it was built, more than a century ago, there was less thought of the potential downside than of convenience.
In contrast, the kind of large pipeline networks that transport crude oil and natural gas for thousands of miles can be routed around communities – and almost certainly will be. The controversial Keystone XL expansion would bypass large communities almost completely, and one proposed alternative route would also enable it to bypass the Ogallala aquifer, reducing the potential environmental damage from a pipeline break.
With all the buzz about how new technologies have opened up new sources of energy production, we have largely failed to generate equal excitement and discussion about how innovations may have made the pipeline networks safer and easier to manage as well. That’s a question that now needs to be asked – and an area that needs to be explored more deeply.
After all, if we can find the energy we require to meet our perceived needs but we can’t get it refined and into our gasoline tanks or furnaces, it doesn’t really matter. Knee-jerk opposition to projects like Keystone and demands for 100 percent reliability are unreasonable. What is reasonable is to anticipate that the cost of our addiction to fossil fuels will rise as innovation makes it possible to go further in protecting both human lives and the environment, from the wellhead to the burner tip.
It’s no simple matter to retrofit an existing rail transportation infrastructure to guide it far enough away from communities like Lac-Megantic that railcars stuffed with crude oil can’t come hurtling down a hillside to detonate like a giant bomb in the middle of the town. The need to construct new pipeline capacity may prove a blessing in disguise, to the extent that the industry is able to emphasize safety in both construction techniques and routing.
Ultimately, we can go further in reducing risk – if we choose – by opening refineries that are closer to the source of the new production, reducing the need to transport crude oil. That’s likely to arouse as much controversy in the communities and regions as is the proposed pipeline, construction, however.
The short-term debate may be about trains versus pipelines; the medium-term debate must focus on how safe innovation can make the process of extracting, transporting and refining oil and gas from non-traditional sources (whether miles under the ocean floor or trapped in shale or bitumen) but the long term debate is how to shift our reliance on those fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. And all three of these discussions need to be taking place simultaneously, with the latter two taking up the bulk of the attention and the resources.
