Pick Your Poison For Crude
U.S. Refinery Capacity by PADD (Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts) in 2012. Source: Congressional Research Service; Energy Information AdministrationCrude oil is moving around the world, around our country, around pristine wilderness, around our cities and towns. It's going to keep moving, will undoubtedly increase during our new energy boom, so what is the safest way to move it?
The short answer is: truck worse than train worse than pipeline worse than boat ( Oilprice.com). But that's only for human death and property destruction. For the normalized amount of oil spilled, it's truck worse than pipeline worse than rail worse than boat ( Congressional Research Service). Different yet again is for environmental impact (dominated by impact to aquatic habitat), where it's boat worse than pipeline worse than truck worse than rail.
So it depends upon what your definition is for worse. Is it death and destruction? Is it amount of oil released? Is it land area or water volume contaminated? Is it habitat destroyed? Is it CO2 emitted?
In both the United States and Canada, more crude oil, petroleum products, and natural gas are transported in pipelines than by all other modes combined, using the unit of ton-mile which is the number of tons shipped over number of miles ( The Fraser Institute).
In the U.S., 70% of crude oil and petroleum products are shipped by pipeline. 23% of oil shipments are on tankers and barges over water. Trucking only accounts for 4% of shipments, and rail for a mere 3%. In Canada, it's even more lopsided. Almost all (97%) of natural gas and petroleum products are transported by pipelines ( Canadian Energy Pipeline Association).
Amid a North American energy boom and a lack of pipeline capacity, crude oil shipping on rail is suddenly increasing. The trains are getting bigger and towing more and more tanker cars. From 1975 to 2012, trains were shorter and spills were rare and small, with about half of those years having no spills above a few gallons ( EarthJustice.org). Then came 2013, in which more crude oil was spilled in U.S. rail incidents than was spilled in the previous thirty-seven years.
Crude is a nasty material, very destructive when it spills into the environment, and very toxic when it contacts humans or animals. It's not even useful for energy, or anything else, until it's chemically processed, or refined, into suitable products like naphtha, gasoline, heating oil, kerosene, asphaltics, mineral spirits, natural gas liquids, and a host of others.
Every crude oil has different properties, such as sulfur content (sweet to sour) or density (light to heavy), and requires a specific chemical processing facility to handle it ( Permian Basin Oil&Gas). Different crudes produce different amounts and types of products, sometimes leading to a glut in one or more of them, like too much natural gas liquids that drops their price dramatically, or not enough heating oil that raises their price.
As an example, the second largest refinery in the United States, Marathon Oil's GaryVille Louisiana facility, can handle over 520,000 barrels a day (bpd) of heavy sour crude from places like Mexico and Canada but can't handle sweet domestic crude from New Mexico.
Thus the reason for the Keystone Pipeline or increased rail transport - to get heavy tar sand crude to refineries along the Gulf Coast than can handle it.
The last entirely new petroleum refinery in the United States opened in 1976 ( Congressional Research Service). Since then, the number of refineries has steadily declined while refining capacity has concentrated in ever-larger facilities. 25% of U.S. capacity is found in only eleven refineries. Recently, Shell's Baytown refinery in Texas, the largest in the nation, was expanded to 600,000 bpd. Most of the big refineries can handle heavy crude, but many smaller refineries can process only light to intermediate crude oil, most of which originates within the U.S.
Thirty-three states have refineries, and most refineries can handle tens-of-thousands to hundreds-of-thousands of barrels per day, but the largest capacity sits around the Gulf Coast and in California where the oil boom in America began. However, in the 1990s after production of sweet domestic crude had significantly declined from mid-century highs, the big companies like Exxon, Shell, CITCO and Valero spent billions upon billion of dollars to retool their refineries to handle foreign heavy crudes.
With the number of refineries decreasing, and capacity concentrating in fewer places, crude usually has to be moved some distance. There are four ways to move it over long distances: by pipeline, by boat, by truck, or by rail. Each has its unique problems and none is without harm.
The question is: which is safest and which should we invest in most? Take two spills for comparison.
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