Tar sands crude will find its way to market, one way or another.


When a runaway oil train exploded in a small Quebec town last week and killed some 50 people, the news coverage rightly focused on the awful loss of life and the carelessness that apparently caused the disaster.

In the days since, though, attention has turned to a second point: What was a train full of oil, from a field 2,000 miles away in the western USA, doing in eastern Canada? Isn't that what pipelines are for?

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Good question. The answer is that there has been a huge, but little noted, boom in the use of railroads to transport oil. The oil that devastated Lac-Megantic, Quebec, for example, came out of the Bakken field in Montana and North Dakota, where production has surged in an area with little pipeline infrastructure.

Trains go places pipelines don't, and railroads can quickly expand capacity without the regulatory obstacles that slow or block new pipelines. U.S. oil shipments by train are up almost 50% over last year, according to the Energy Information Administration.

In comparison with trains, pipelines move oil more efficiently and cheaply, but when they break they spill more oil. Train accidents tend to spill less oil, but the fatality rates for train accidents are higher than for pipeline mishaps.

This surge in oil train shipments has big implications, not least for the seemingly endless controversy over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring oil from huge tar sands deposits in western Canada to terminals in the central USA. Keystone needs approval by the State Department, and ultimately by President Obama, because it crosses the U.S. border. The process has dragged on for years; a final decision could come later this year.

As we've argued previously, Keystone deserves to be approved. It would provide a secure new source of crude for a nation that still imports about 36% of its oil. And if the pipeline is not built, the oil won't stay in the ground. It will find its way to other places by other means.

Environmentalists insist that blocking Keystone would limit or stop production of tar sands oil, but growing evidence suggests that won't happen. Not only are producers able to use trains, there are proposals to expand or re-purpose two existing Canadian pipelines that would carry tar sands oil either west to Pacific Rim markets or to the east. The Bakken oil was headed for a refinery in eastern Canada.

Obama said recently that Keystone should be approved only if it did "not significantly exacerbate" greenhouse gas emissions. Interestingly, an initial analysis by the State Department concluded exactly that, reasoning that if Keystone were not built, the tar sands oil would be sold anyway.

Critics have attacked the report, and their critiques have some merit. Pipeline politics in Canada are also difficult, and shipping oil by train is up to three times as expensive as pipelines. But those are details. The Lac-Megantic crash is a tragic reminder that whether it comes from U.S. fields or Canada's tar sands, oil will find a way to market one way or another. The best outcome is for that market to be here.


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