There is not much good about crude oil from an environmental standpoint.
Environmentalists oppose the Keystone XL pipeline. If the pipeline is completed it would transport oil from Canada to the southern United States.
But the issue of getting oil from Point A to Point B may be more complex than a single pipeline.
Investigative journalist Marcus Stern
has studied the issue of transporting crude oil by railroad in depth,
and he recently appeared on the NPR show “Fresh Air” to discuss his
findings. And they’re alarming.
Last month, a railroad car carrying oil went off the rails in rural West Virginia,
sending massive fireballs into the air and polluting the drinking water
for 2,000 people. That was not an anomaly. Similar wrecks happened in
December 2013 in North Dakota and in July 2013 in Canada. The crash in
Canada killed 47 people.
Stern explained that North Dakota’s
recent oil boom has meant finding a way to move that oil and that that
since 2008, the amount of oil being transported out of the state has
grown by 4,000 percent.
Much of that transport occurs
by railroad car, which raises a number of disconcerting questions.
First, there’s the matter of infrastructure, an issue which John Oliver dealt with on his show last weekend.
Every
day, railroad cars carry thousands of gallons of crude oil on bridges
down major rivers and into population centers. An accident–which, as we’ve seen, can happen–in one of these areas would be larger in scale than the one’s we’ve seen recently.
Stern said the safety of the
bridges is actually the responsibility of the railroads, thanks to a
labyrinthine set of bureaucratic rules. Because of that, the inspection
records of those bridges aren’t publicly available.
Many people are under the
impression that railroad companies own the railroad cars. That’s not
true in the case of crude oil. The railroad companies own the tracks and
the refineries, and oil producers own the cars. And by law, companies
can’t refuse cargo.
As for the railroad cars themselves, they are old. Many of them were built to haul non-flammable goods like corn syrup.
And when the worst does
happen, it’s up to the local governments’ emergency responders to get
people to safety and then clean the mess up. In a rural area, which is
where the wrecks have happened so far, that’s an enormous financial and
personnel burden.
So who’s responsible for the transport of crude oil? Everyone and no one.
Does this mean the Keystone XL pipeline is now a worthwhile project?
No, it means we need to work harder to find alternate forms of energy.
