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Oil pipelines do one thing - transport oil. Not water, not milk, not corn syrup. Just oil. Rail can transport anything. Containers, tankers, even rocket booste

Oil pipelines do one thing - transport oil. Not water, not milk, not corn syrup. Just oil. Rail can transport anything. Containers, tankers, even rocket booster segments. Yes, we're absolutely taking a short term hit, but investing in general purpose infrastructure that can be adapted for new technology and demands is a good thing. The continental rail network started off with coal powered steam trains, then diesel, now diesel-electric and even some pure electric locomotives. Maybe this century it will evolve past fossil fuels as well. So yes, cancel the pipeline, but in its place invest in the safety and reliability of rail networks.

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rohitb91 5y ago
What about safety and natural disasters from rail and cost?
- dugditches 5y ago
  Let alone the cost of employing all the union railway workers, maintenance crews, technicians, etc and the footprint of the trains themselves operating. There's a reason pipelines exist, and that is in their simplicity of transporting the product efficiently. Sure they can't transport anything else, but I don't think too many rocket boosters would be traveling to remote areas in Canada.
  - megablast 5y ago
    Good. Anything that makes oil more expensive is good for the planet and everyone who lives on it.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      Burning oil for non productive reasons will make it more expensive, but it wont save the planet.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > Let alone the cost of employing all the union railway workers, maintenance crews, technicians, etc Nitpicking to make a point: Employing people and paying them well is not just an expense; it has some enormous benefits.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      In the context of a discussion about what method of delivering oil is more efficient, wasting resources on employing people for unnecessary tasks does not have enormous benefits. From a society point of view, if the goal is to deliver oil, then it is a societal loss to do it inefficiently just to pay more people. If the goal is to pay people, then just pay people, no need to do it in a roundabout way of forcing an inefficiency into the system.
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        > wasting resources on employing people for unnecessary tasks does not have enormous benefits Agreed, but that assumes perfect knowledge by business owners of what is most efficient. I think business owners often lean much too far toward seeing labor as a commodity and an expense, to be minimized. Another approach is to see humans as the most powerful parts of the organization, and to invest in and empower them. I'm speaking in the abstract; of course it's not always the case that more investment in labor is better. But there is a history of it: For example (and this is more a legend than something I have details on), back in the 1980s American auto companies had long treated workers as commodities. Toyota was far more successful by empowering them; famously, any worker could stop the assembly line.
      - lupire 5y ago
        Labor isn't ecologically inefficient. People are alive regardless of if they work.
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      Paying people well is very negative for the environment. A poorly paid person will have a smaller car, smaller house, use less electricity and gas, and throw away far less trash. In fact, wealth is very strongly correlated to environmental impact. Sure, rich people might be buying electric cars and recyclable coffee cups, but it nowhere near offsets the bigger house with A/C...
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    But what if the product they’re transporting will kill us all?
    - koolba 5y ago
      No that’s transported by rail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_flask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_flask
      - ashtonkem 5y ago
        Used nuclear material is not capable of killing everyone in an accident, nowhere close. More people have died drilling for and refining oil than have died in nuclear accidents, and that’s before we consider the existential risk that global warming poses.
        brorfred 5y ago
        And how many people have died in the strip mining of uranium?
        ashtonkem 5y ago
        Probably not as many as you think. Studies from a New Mexico mine ending in the 1970s estimated an extra 62.4 deaths per 100,000 miners. That’s a lot, but it doesn’t even hold a candle to coal mining in the same era. In 1970 the coal mining fatality rate in the US was 960 per 100,000 (1,388 fatalities for 144,480 miners). Secondly, most uranium is leeched from the ground, not strip mined. This is far safer for the worker, although it does pose other safety considerations for the community. Third, we can change these things. Coal mining has gone from ~900 per 100,000 workers to ~24 per 100,000 workers. Workplace health and safety standards are a choice we can make as a society. If we can make coal mining safer, there’s no reason we can’t make uranium mining safer.
        lupire 5y ago
        Is that true per joule?
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Rail is very, very safe. In some areas taking the train is safer than walking. Now to be fair, oil pipelines are usually safer still. But the solution here is obvious; stop using oil.
  - swader999 5y ago
    Stop using oil, yeah sure. This will just transfer consumption from the most ethical and environmentally sound jurisdiction in the world to the worst. Ask the town in Quebec that had many people burned alive from a oil train derailment how safe it is. The Lac-Mégantic rail disaster occurred in the town of Lac-Mégantic, in the Eastern Townships region of Quebec, Canada, at approximately 01:15 EDT,[1][2] on July 6, 2013, when an unattended 73-car freight train carrying Bakken Formation crude oil rolled down a 1.2% grade from Nantes and derailed downtown, resulting in the fire and explosion of multiple tank cars. Forty-seven people were killed.[3] More than 30 buildings in the town's centre, roughly half of the downtown area, were destroyed,[2][4] and all but three of the thirty-nine remaining downtown buildings had to be demolished due to petroleum contamination of the townsite.[5] Initial newspaper reports described a 1-kilometre (0.6 mi) blast radius.[6] ~ Wikipedia
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      1. Consumption is not moveable like that; you’re describing a process more akin to how manufacturing moves. The world’s poorest people won’t suddenly be able to afford all this oil infrastructure if the richer nations stop consuming it. Especially if doing so reduces economies of scale. 2. From a global warming perspective, there is no such thing as an ethical jurisdiction to emit carbon from. Carbon is carbon, and it affects us all whether or not it comes with other forms of pollution.
      - swader999 5y ago
        I should have worded that better. I meant production, if you read it carefully I think it still implies that but I should have been more clear. By ethical I mean human rights abuse, treatment of women and minorities. Why would you reward Saudi Arabia, Iran and so on and punish a place like Western Canada?
- specialist 5y ago
  Much of the opposition to pipelines is their propensity to fail. There are many, many pipelines in various states of neglect and failure. With no plans or resources to fix them. We don't even monitor most of them. We should be decommissioning pipelines, not building new ones.
cgb223 5y ago
Does building railroads through areas have the same/better environmental/socioeconomic impact as a pipeline?
- ruste 5y ago
  In terms of oil transport alone it's worse. Oil is spilled at a significantly higher rate when transported by rail.
  - gnopgnip 5y ago
    That doesn't mean the impact is as large
  - notatoad 5y ago
    In addition to more oil being spilled, rail lines transit through populated places while pipelines are routed away from them. There's a rail line running right through the central business district of my town, and it's the primary route between Alberta and the Pacific ocean. I sure wish all that oil was travelling through a pipeline instead of my town.
    - lupire 5y ago
      Why can't the rail be rerouted?
      - notatoad 5y ago
        because rail is used for things other than oil (the whole reason people in this thread say transporting oil by rail is better), and those things require it to be near populated places. if you build a dedicated oil railway that doesn't go anywhere populated and just goes from the oilfield to the refinery, then you've reinvented a pipeline, but worse.
  - kajecounterhack 5y ago
    > Oil is spilled at a significantly higher rate when transported by rail. That doesn't seem to be correct. Maybe you mean spill incidence is higher when transported by rail? Table 9: https://imgur.com/a/3uIKVZc https://imgur.com/a/3uIKVZc -- this makes it very clear that total volume spilled and volume spilled per incident is far greater from pipelines. FWIW this table is from a paper that is trying to argue that pipelines are safer. But they quantify safety with the metric "how many people get hurt." In making that argument they make statements like: "The majority of incidents occur on road and rail." << duh, people are usually not around when pipelines spill. Also driving is hazardous. Also rail cars and vehicles are monitored, whereas long pipelines are not so easily monitored; some spills may not even be detected for a long time. Related physics explaining a little bit of why long pipelines are hard to build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msxMRwQyXI8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msxMRwQyXI8
postalrat 5y ago
Trains need tracks but airplanes don't. Airplanes can also transport water, milk, corn syrup, and oil. Forget about trains and build more planes.
- zardo 5y ago
  Have you ever bought milk in a town where it comes in by airplane?
  - canadianfella 5y ago
    Yes
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  Why not just use catapults and cut out the middleman? Landing could be difficult but I'm willing to offer a discount on really big nets.
- bagels 5y ago
  The economics of shipping oil by plane vs train, tanker or pipeline are laughably poor.
  - postalrat 5y ago
    Trains are pretty laughable compared to pipes https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-263B-3126 https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-263B-3126 If paywalled maybe you can still see https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-FR879_expert_G_20141124000833.jpg https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-FR879_expert_G_...
ethn 5y ago
That’s not true pipelines can transport oil, ammonium nitrate, be laid with internet fiber, and a variety of other chemicals.
- akiselev 5y ago
  It's true in spirit, if not the letter. Oil pipelines are useless for other things until they're cleaned and repurposed which isn't a cheap process.
  - ikr678 5y ago
    Getting the pipeline route established is a pretty significant upfront cost. Easements, land purchases, agreements with all the various stakeholders are expensive. Even not reusing the existing oil pipeline, being able to repupose the corridor and corridor access points to lay a natural gas pipe or some other linear infrastructure is a pretty big deal.
    - jeltz 5y ago
      Rail is also a linear infrastructure which can be used to put fiber in the ground cheaply.
- minsc__and__boo 5y ago
  Is there really demand for laying fiber between Hardisty Canada and Nebraska?
  - dd36 5y ago
    r/conservative and r/conspiracy are popular.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Assuming you happen to have one of those products that need to move in the exact same place as oil once did, sure. But a lot of these pipelines go between wells and refineries or docks, a path useless for anything but oil.
spodek 5y ago
The fastest, most effective way to transition from fossil fuels is to limit their supply. Any parent knows you can read all you want about how to raise a child before it's born, but the real learning starts at birth. Within seconds you learn more than before when it was abstract. Likewise, to learn to live without fossil fuels, shutting down supply will lead us to face the actual problems we have to solve, not theoretical. Obviously, don't shut everything all at once, and protect the helpless, hospitals, and necessary things. Among the rest of us, no one will be injured. Entrepreneurs will innovate. Inconveniences will lead to learning and life improvement.
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  But is the supply actually being limited? Won't a similar amount of fuel be transported via rail or trucks? What is the carbon footprint of transporting X kg of fuel over pipeline vs rail? It seems to me that the main outcome is that the same amount of fuel is transported with a costlier (environmentally, and financial) vehicle.
- HonestOp001 5y ago
  Decisions are trade offs. The cost of resources will become more scarce here. Which means the poor will pay more for their fuel prices. If you believe that no one will be injured, you are looking at level one impacts. Any decision needs to be looked at as a trade off. Russia, China, India, and Iran must be so happy with the ways we shoot ourselves in the arm. Fracking moved us closer to getting away from the Middle East, but the pipeline cancellation, the fracking fights, and the anti-nuke efforts is forcing us to get closer to them.
  - kajecounterhack 5y ago
    Pipeline spills affect drinking water and ecology for US citizens. Fracking has externalities that again, can directly hurt our populace and ecosystems we live adjacent to. Nuclear is just hard to do right, and I for one am glad we are careful with where/when we deploy it. I disagree with this framing that "we shoot ourselves in the arm." As a US citizen I think a better way to think of it is that we insist on proceeding with caution when it comes to diversifying our energy supply, and while in the short term we do have a dependence on foreign fossil fuels, there are certainly many efforts being made to reduce that. And many of these efforts don't involve looking for more non-renewable oil. If you think of our energy supply as a long-running software service that can't go down, replacing foreign oil with fracking+local pipelines is like replacing old short term dependencies on new short-term dependencies that we pay maintenance cost on. Negative externalities must be factored into those cost decisions. Similarly nuclear is like building a very complex internal service that, if done right, will pay huge dividends, but if done wrong, can be quite catastrophic and expensive.
jmspring 5y ago
Keystone proposed to transported one thing - Canadian Oil to Canadian tankers. Outside of running the pipeline in the states, it would not impact US oil prices - outside of extra capacity which is heavily regulated to control price.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  Isn't oil one of the most fungible commodities?
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    It’s arguably one of the least. Oil is not one thing, it’s a blend of hundreds or thousands of different compounds. There is a world of difference between light sweet crude and oil sands, and those are different from sour oil. Some types of oil must be diluted with other types of oil can consume it, such as tar sands oil.
29athrowaway 5y ago
Rail networks can be easily sabotaged, and therefore suck. That's why the US for the most part uses trucks not trains. Interestingly, the max-flow min-cut theorem was apparently developed as a way to find the best way to sabotage railroads (i.e.: how to cause to cause the most harm with the fewest "cuts" = sabotage).
- retox 5y ago
  I'm completely ignorant on the topic, are pipelines not easily sabotaged?
  - 29athrowaway 5y ago
    Pipelines can transport oil continuously and quickly but they leak all the time.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > Rail networks can be easily sabotaged, and therefore suck. > That's why the US for the most part uses trucks not trains. Do you mean, that's why the U.S. built infrastructure around interstate highways and not rail? Why did European countries and other places conclude differently? Is there anything you can recommend reading about it? The more scholarly the better.
- stadium 5y ago
  > That's why the US for the most part uses trucks not trains Nope. The interstate highway system followed the railroad system. It also followed world war 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System Rail infra investment stopped after ww2 and never restarted. All of these railroad engine power train tech improvements may have happened, but the rails on ground infrastructure peaked in the 1950's . Interstate highways also made most of the US accessable to heavy aircraft in case an emergency airport needed to be assembled on short notice. It's a network of runways. Interestingly, the German Autobahn has a lot more curves, but it's debatable if that is to make them harder to bomb or to keep drivers awake. Also many US cities had full fledged local rail systems that were paved over to make way for roads and cars.
wolverine876 5y ago
> Rail can transport anything. Containers, tankers, even rocket booster segments. While I get the idea and oppose oil infrastructure made possible by the greenhouse gas subsidy (i.e., that the gasses are dumped on the public), rail can't efficiently transport electricity. It's not infrastructure for low-carbon or zero-carbon energy (with some possible future exceptions).
- awestroke 5y ago
  What does that have to do with anything? Do you suggest you can transport electricity in oil pipelines?
- londons_explore 5y ago
  Rail can transport electricity reasonably efficiently in the form of aluminium. Find a place with abundant electricity. Ship aluminium ore there by rail. Smelt the stuff there with the cheap electricity. Ship the resulting aluminium back. The end result is more energy efficient than using a power line to move the electricity to the aluminium ore.
randymercury 5y ago
Hydrogen would be a viable alternate use for the pipelines in the long term. There are some promising projects going on in Alberta for producing hydrogen in less carbon intensive ways. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-air-products-plans-13b-hydrogen-plant-in-alberta-as-oil-and-gas/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-air-product...
- mjevans 5y ago
  Hydrogen is even smaller than helium, which is used for leak testing vacuum systems. I hypothesize that a hydrogen leak is less destructive than an oil leak, but that's still a problem.
  - neltnerb 5y ago
    Making a pipe leak tight to hydrogen versus leak tight to oil is not even playing in the same ballpark. Hydrogen leaks through practically everything, oil is viscous. Plus hydrogen burns much more easily and the flame is transparent.
  - ivalm 5y ago
    Atomic radius of helium is smaller than hydrogen 31 vs 53 pm. Hydrogen gas is also typically in the form H2, which is much larger. At the same time ofc oil pipelines will still be too leaky.
  - randymercury 5y ago
    Favoring a shotgun approach towards GHG emissions downstream is there a better approach towards building an infrastructure distributing hydrogen? That question isn't intended as rhetorical
- simbas 5y ago
  It seems it's hard to transport pressurized hydrogen in pipelines as hydrogen embrittles steel. Gas utilities are trying to implement this to lower the carbon footprint of their gas (when hydrogen comes from renewable sources). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement
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jcranmer 5y ago
> The continental rail network started off with coal powered steam trains, then diesel, now diesel-electric and even some pure electric locomotives. The actual evolution process was wood-powered steam trains, then coal-powered steam, then electric, then diesel-electric. Yes, in the US, several railroads electrified then deelectrified, because it turns out that (for freight at least) diesel-electrics get you most of the useful benefits of electric locomotives without all of the problems of having to string up electric catenary and worry about provisioning traction power stations for your 1000s of miles of mainline track.
- manquer 5y ago
  There can be a substantial cost saving switching from diesel to electric fully. India for example has been investing in this convertion last 2-3 years and are expecting 4-5 billion dollars savings every year by going full electric in the next 2 - 3 years. The networks are very different , single public owner/lots of private owners , frieght/passenger ratios are different, Density is different etc,however there can be cost savings
  - lumberingjack 5y ago
    Yes in India gets coal super cheap and they use a ton of it to make their electric. All these electric cars are just coal cars, all these electric trains are just coal trains
    - Maakuth 5y ago
      They are also building quite a bit of solar power. The obvious difference between actual coal trains and electric trains (even running on coal electricity), is that you don't need to change a thing in the trains themselves to reduce the emissions of the system. Certainly it would be nicer if India already generated their electricity carbon neutrally, but moving from coal powered electric trains to PV powered electric trains is so much easier than from diesel trains.
    - jeltz 5y ago
      Sure, but most of Europe use electric and we generate a lot of our electricity from nuclear and hydro. By switching to electric India can change to other sources of electricity in the future.
bawolff 5y ago
Being generic comes at a cost of doing everything less well. Sometimes that's the right trade off, but i'm not sure that's the right trade off here, especially when it comes to safety and envornment.
- adjkant 5y ago
  > I'm not sure that's the right trade off here, especially when it comes to safety and environment. Can you give some reasons why you think that?
  - bawolff 5y ago
    My understanding is that transporting oil by rail takes more energy (so more carbon), and if things go wrong, they go much worse than if things go wrong in a pipeline. I think pipelines make sense as long as we are continuing to use oil. This particular pipeline project was pretty stupid though, and kenny's support of it was either gross incompetence or an indirect way to defraud tax payers.

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rohitb91 5y ago

What about safety and natural disasters from rail and cost?

dugditches 5y ago
Let alone the cost of employing all the union railway workers, maintenance crews, technicians, etc and the footprint of the trains themselves operating. There's a reason pipelines exist, and that is in their simplicity of transporting the product efficiently. Sure they can't transport anything else, but I don't think too many rocket boosters would be traveling to remote areas in Canada.
- megablast 5y ago
  Good. Anything that makes oil more expensive is good for the planet and everyone who lives on it.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Burning oil for non productive reasons will make it more expensive, but it wont save the planet.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > Let alone the cost of employing all the union railway workers, maintenance crews, technicians, etc Nitpicking to make a point: Employing people and paying them well is not just an expense; it has some enormous benefits.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    In the context of a discussion about what method of delivering oil is more efficient, wasting resources on employing people for unnecessary tasks does not have enormous benefits. From a society point of view, if the goal is to deliver oil, then it is a societal loss to do it inefficiently just to pay more people. If the goal is to pay people, then just pay people, no need to do it in a roundabout way of forcing an inefficiency into the system.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > wasting resources on employing people for unnecessary tasks does not have enormous benefits Agreed, but that assumes perfect knowledge by business owners of what is most efficient. I think business owners often lean much too far toward seeing labor as a commodity and an expense, to be minimized. Another approach is to see humans as the most powerful parts of the organization, and to invest in and empower them. I'm speaking in the abstract; of course it's not always the case that more investment in labor is better. But there is a history of it: For example (and this is more a legend than something I have details on), back in the 1980s American auto companies had long treated workers as commodities. Toyota was far more successful by empowering them; famously, any worker could stop the assembly line.
    - lupire 5y ago
      Labor isn't ecologically inefficient. People are alive regardless of if they work.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    Paying people well is very negative for the environment. A poorly paid person will have a smaller car, smaller house, use less electricity and gas, and throw away far less trash. In fact, wealth is very strongly correlated to environmental impact. Sure, rich people might be buying electric cars and recyclable coffee cups, but it nowhere near offsets the bigger house with A/C...
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  But what if the product they’re transporting will kill us all?
  - koolba 5y ago
    No that’s transported by rail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_flask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_flask
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      Used nuclear material is not capable of killing everyone in an accident, nowhere close. More people have died drilling for and refining oil than have died in nuclear accidents, and that’s before we consider the existential risk that global warming poses.
      - brorfred 5y ago
        And how many people have died in the strip mining of uranium?
        ashtonkem 5y ago
        Probably not as many as you think. Studies from a New Mexico mine ending in the 1970s estimated an extra 62.4 deaths per 100,000 miners. That’s a lot, but it doesn’t even hold a candle to coal mining in the same era. In 1970 the coal mining fatality rate in the US was 960 per 100,000 (1,388 fatalities for 144,480 miners). Secondly, most uranium is leeched from the ground, not strip mined. This is far safer for the worker, although it does pose other safety considerations for the community. Third, we can change these things. Coal mining has gone from ~900 per 100,000 workers to ~24 per 100,000 workers. Workplace health and safety standards are a choice we can make as a society. If we can make coal mining safer, there’s no reason we can’t make uranium mining safer.
      - lupire 5y ago
        Is that true per joule?
ashtonkem 5y ago
Rail is very, very safe. In some areas taking the train is safer than walking. Now to be fair, oil pipelines are usually safer still. But the solution here is obvious; stop using oil.
- swader999 5y ago
  Stop using oil, yeah sure. This will just transfer consumption from the most ethical and environmentally sound jurisdiction in the world to the worst. Ask the town in Quebec that had many people burned alive from a oil train derailment how safe it is. The Lac-Mégantic rail disaster occurred in the town of Lac-Mégantic, in the Eastern Townships region of Quebec, Canada, at approximately 01:15 EDT,[1][2] on July 6, 2013, when an unattended 73-car freight train carrying Bakken Formation crude oil rolled down a 1.2% grade from Nantes and derailed downtown, resulting in the fire and explosion of multiple tank cars. Forty-seven people were killed.[3] More than 30 buildings in the town's centre, roughly half of the downtown area, were destroyed,[2][4] and all but three of the thirty-nine remaining downtown buildings had to be demolished due to petroleum contamination of the townsite.[5] Initial newspaper reports described a 1-kilometre (0.6 mi) blast radius.[6] ~ Wikipedia
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    1. Consumption is not moveable like that; you’re describing a process more akin to how manufacturing moves. The world’s poorest people won’t suddenly be able to afford all this oil infrastructure if the richer nations stop consuming it. Especially if doing so reduces economies of scale. 2. From a global warming perspective, there is no such thing as an ethical jurisdiction to emit carbon from. Carbon is carbon, and it affects us all whether or not it comes with other forms of pollution.
    - swader999 5y ago
      I should have worded that better. I meant production, if you read it carefully I think it still implies that but I should have been more clear. By ethical I mean human rights abuse, treatment of women and minorities. Why would you reward Saudi Arabia, Iran and so on and punish a place like Western Canada?
specialist 5y ago
Much of the opposition to pipelines is their propensity to fail. There are many, many pipelines in various states of neglect and failure. With no plans or resources to fix them. We don't even monitor most of them. We should be decommissioning pipelines, not building new ones.

cgb223 5y ago

Does building railroads through areas have the same/better environmental/socioeconomic impact as a pipeline?

ruste 5y ago
In terms of oil transport alone it's worse. Oil is spilled at a significantly higher rate when transported by rail.
- gnopgnip 5y ago
  That doesn't mean the impact is as large
- notatoad 5y ago
  In addition to more oil being spilled, rail lines transit through populated places while pipelines are routed away from them. There's a rail line running right through the central business district of my town, and it's the primary route between Alberta and the Pacific ocean. I sure wish all that oil was travelling through a pipeline instead of my town.
  - lupire 5y ago
    Why can't the rail be rerouted?
    - notatoad 5y ago
      because rail is used for things other than oil (the whole reason people in this thread say transporting oil by rail is better), and those things require it to be near populated places. if you build a dedicated oil railway that doesn't go anywhere populated and just goes from the oilfield to the refinery, then you've reinvented a pipeline, but worse.
- kajecounterhack 5y ago
  > Oil is spilled at a significantly higher rate when transported by rail. That doesn't seem to be correct. Maybe you mean spill incidence is higher when transported by rail? Table 9: https://imgur.com/a/3uIKVZc https://imgur.com/a/3uIKVZc -- this makes it very clear that total volume spilled and volume spilled per incident is far greater from pipelines. FWIW this table is from a paper that is trying to argue that pipelines are safer. But they quantify safety with the metric "how many people get hurt." In making that argument they make statements like: "The majority of incidents occur on road and rail." << duh, people are usually not around when pipelines spill. Also driving is hazardous. Also rail cars and vehicles are monitored, whereas long pipelines are not so easily monitored; some spills may not even be detected for a long time. Related physics explaining a little bit of why long pipelines are hard to build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msxMRwQyXI8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msxMRwQyXI8

postalrat 5y ago

Trains need tracks but airplanes don't. Airplanes can also transport water, milk, corn syrup, and oil. Forget about trains and build more planes.

zardo 5y ago
Have you ever bought milk in a town where it comes in by airplane?
- canadianfella 5y ago
  Yes
anigbrowl 5y ago
Why not just use catapults and cut out the middleman? Landing could be difficult but I'm willing to offer a discount on really big nets.
bagels 5y ago
The economics of shipping oil by plane vs train, tanker or pipeline are laughably poor.
- postalrat 5y ago
  Trains are pretty laughable compared to pipes https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-263B-3126 https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-263B-3126 If paywalled maybe you can still see https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-FR879_expert_G_20141124000833.jpg https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-FR879_expert_G_...

ethn 5y ago

That’s not true pipelines can transport oil, ammonium nitrate, be laid with internet fiber, and a variety of other chemicals.

akiselev 5y ago
It's true in spirit, if not the letter. Oil pipelines are useless for other things until they're cleaned and repurposed which isn't a cheap process.
- ikr678 5y ago
  Getting the pipeline route established is a pretty significant upfront cost. Easements, land purchases, agreements with all the various stakeholders are expensive. Even not reusing the existing oil pipeline, being able to repupose the corridor and corridor access points to lay a natural gas pipe or some other linear infrastructure is a pretty big deal.
  - jeltz 5y ago
    Rail is also a linear infrastructure which can be used to put fiber in the ground cheaply.
minsc__and__boo 5y ago
Is there really demand for laying fiber between Hardisty Canada and Nebraska?
- dd36 5y ago
  r/conservative and r/conspiracy are popular.
ashtonkem 5y ago
Assuming you happen to have one of those products that need to move in the exact same place as oil once did, sure. But a lot of these pipelines go between wells and refineries or docks, a path useless for anything but oil.

spodek 5y ago

The fastest, most effective way to transition from fossil fuels is to limit their supply. Any parent knows you can read all you want about how to raise a child before it's born, but the real learning starts at birth. Within seconds you learn more than before when it was abstract. Likewise, to learn to live without fossil fuels, shutting down supply will lead us to face the actual problems we have to solve, not theoretical. Obviously, don't shut everything all at once, and protect the helpless, hospitals, and necessary things. Among the rest of us, no one will be injured. Entrepreneurs will innovate. Inconveniences will lead to learning and life improvement.

Manuel_D 5y ago
But is the supply actually being limited? Won't a similar amount of fuel be transported via rail or trucks? What is the carbon footprint of transporting X kg of fuel over pipeline vs rail? It seems to me that the main outcome is that the same amount of fuel is transported with a costlier (environmentally, and financial) vehicle.
HonestOp001 5y ago
Decisions are trade offs. The cost of resources will become more scarce here. Which means the poor will pay more for their fuel prices. If you believe that no one will be injured, you are looking at level one impacts. Any decision needs to be looked at as a trade off. Russia, China, India, and Iran must be so happy with the ways we shoot ourselves in the arm. Fracking moved us closer to getting away from the Middle East, but the pipeline cancellation, the fracking fights, and the anti-nuke efforts is forcing us to get closer to them.
- kajecounterhack 5y ago
  Pipeline spills affect drinking water and ecology for US citizens. Fracking has externalities that again, can directly hurt our populace and ecosystems we live adjacent to. Nuclear is just hard to do right, and I for one am glad we are careful with where/when we deploy it. I disagree with this framing that "we shoot ourselves in the arm." As a US citizen I think a better way to think of it is that we insist on proceeding with caution when it comes to diversifying our energy supply, and while in the short term we do have a dependence on foreign fossil fuels, there are certainly many efforts being made to reduce that. And many of these efforts don't involve looking for more non-renewable oil. If you think of our energy supply as a long-running software service that can't go down, replacing foreign oil with fracking+local pipelines is like replacing old short term dependencies on new short-term dependencies that we pay maintenance cost on. Negative externalities must be factored into those cost decisions. Similarly nuclear is like building a very complex internal service that, if done right, will pay huge dividends, but if done wrong, can be quite catastrophic and expensive.

jmspring 5y ago

Keystone proposed to transported one thing - Canadian Oil to Canadian tankers. Outside of running the pipeline in the states, it would not impact US oil prices - outside of extra capacity which is heavily regulated to control price.

Rebelgecko 5y ago
Isn't oil one of the most fungible commodities?
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  It’s arguably one of the least. Oil is not one thing, it’s a blend of hundreds or thousands of different compounds. There is a world of difference between light sweet crude and oil sands, and those are different from sour oil. Some types of oil must be diluted with other types of oil can consume it, such as tar sands oil.

29athrowaway 5y ago

Rail networks can be easily sabotaged, and therefore suck. That's why the US for the most part uses trucks not trains. Interestingly, the max-flow min-cut theorem was apparently developed as a way to find the best way to sabotage railroads (i.e.: how to cause to cause the most harm with the fewest "cuts" = sabotage).

retox 5y ago
I'm completely ignorant on the topic, are pipelines not easily sabotaged?
- 29athrowaway 5y ago
  Pipelines can transport oil continuously and quickly but they leak all the time.
wolverine876 5y ago
> Rail networks can be easily sabotaged, and therefore suck. > That's why the US for the most part uses trucks not trains. Do you mean, that's why the U.S. built infrastructure around interstate highways and not rail? Why did European countries and other places conclude differently? Is there anything you can recommend reading about it? The more scholarly the better.
stadium 5y ago
> That's why the US for the most part uses trucks not trains Nope. The interstate highway system followed the railroad system. It also followed world war 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System Rail infra investment stopped after ww2 and never restarted. All of these railroad engine power train tech improvements may have happened, but the rails on ground infrastructure peaked in the 1950's . Interstate highways also made most of the US accessable to heavy aircraft in case an emergency airport needed to be assembled on short notice. It's a network of runways. Interestingly, the German Autobahn has a lot more curves, but it's debatable if that is to make them harder to bomb or to keep drivers awake. Also many US cities had full fledged local rail systems that were paved over to make way for roads and cars.

wolverine876 5y ago

> Rail can transport anything. Containers, tankers, even rocket booster segments. While I get the idea and oppose oil infrastructure made possible by the greenhouse gas subsidy (i.e., that the gasses are dumped on the public), rail can't efficiently transport electricity. It's not infrastructure for low-carbon or zero-carbon energy (with some possible future exceptions).

awestroke 5y ago
What does that have to do with anything? Do you suggest you can transport electricity in oil pipelines?
londons_explore 5y ago
Rail can transport electricity reasonably efficiently in the form of aluminium. Find a place with abundant electricity. Ship aluminium ore there by rail. Smelt the stuff there with the cheap electricity. Ship the resulting aluminium back. The end result is more energy efficient than using a power line to move the electricity to the aluminium ore.

randymercury 5y ago

Hydrogen would be a viable alternate use for the pipelines in the long term. There are some promising projects going on in Alberta for producing hydrogen in less carbon intensive ways. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-air-products-plans-13b-hydrogen-plant-in-alberta-as-oil-and-gas/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-air-product...

mjevans 5y ago
Hydrogen is even smaller than helium, which is used for leak testing vacuum systems. I hypothesize that a hydrogen leak is less destructive than an oil leak, but that's still a problem.
- neltnerb 5y ago
  Making a pipe leak tight to hydrogen versus leak tight to oil is not even playing in the same ballpark. Hydrogen leaks through practically everything, oil is viscous. Plus hydrogen burns much more easily and the flame is transparent.
- ivalm 5y ago
  Atomic radius of helium is smaller than hydrogen 31 vs 53 pm. Hydrogen gas is also typically in the form H2, which is much larger. At the same time ofc oil pipelines will still be too leaky.
- randymercury 5y ago
  Favoring a shotgun approach towards GHG emissions downstream is there a better approach towards building an infrastructure distributing hydrogen? That question isn't intended as rhetorical
simbas 5y ago
It seems it's hard to transport pressurized hydrogen in pipelines as hydrogen embrittles steel. Gas utilities are trying to implement this to lower the carbon footprint of their gas (when hydrogen comes from renewable sources). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement

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jcranmer 5y ago

> The continental rail network started off with coal powered steam trains, then diesel, now diesel-electric and even some pure electric locomotives. The actual evolution process was wood-powered steam trains, then coal-powered steam, then electric, then diesel-electric. Yes, in the US, several railroads electrified then deelectrified, because it turns out that (for freight at least) diesel-electrics get you most of the useful benefits of electric locomotives without all of the problems of having to string up electric catenary and worry about provisioning traction power stations for your 1000s of miles of mainline track.

manquer 5y ago
There can be a substantial cost saving switching from diesel to electric fully. India for example has been investing in this convertion last 2-3 years and are expecting 4-5 billion dollars savings every year by going full electric in the next 2 - 3 years. The networks are very different , single public owner/lots of private owners , frieght/passenger ratios are different, Density is different etc,however there can be cost savings
- lumberingjack 5y ago
  Yes in India gets coal super cheap and they use a ton of it to make their electric. All these electric cars are just coal cars, all these electric trains are just coal trains
  - Maakuth 5y ago
    They are also building quite a bit of solar power. The obvious difference between actual coal trains and electric trains (even running on coal electricity), is that you don't need to change a thing in the trains themselves to reduce the emissions of the system. Certainly it would be nicer if India already generated their electricity carbon neutrally, but moving from coal powered electric trains to PV powered electric trains is so much easier than from diesel trains.
  - jeltz 5y ago
    Sure, but most of Europe use electric and we generate a lot of our electricity from nuclear and hydro. By switching to electric India can change to other sources of electricity in the future.

bawolff 5y ago

Being generic comes at a cost of doing everything less well. Sometimes that's the right trade off, but i'm not sure that's the right trade off here, especially when it comes to safety and envornment.

adjkant 5y ago
> I'm not sure that's the right trade off here, especially when it comes to safety and environment. Can you give some reasons why you think that?
- bawolff 5y ago
  My understanding is that transporting oil by rail takes more energy (so more carbon), and if things go wrong, they go much worse than if things go wrong in a pipeline. I think pipelines make sense as long as we are continuing to use oil. This particular pipeline project was pretty stupid though, and kenny's support of it was either gross incompetence or an indirect way to defraud tax payers.