Pipeline transport oil-contaminated sediment and debris from the Kalamazoo River system. However, oil was still being found in affected waters in October 2012. Fossil fuels can be transported by pipeline, rail, truck, or ship, though natural gas requires compression or liquification to make vehicle transport economical. For transport of crude oil via these four modes, various reports rank pipelines as proportionately causing less human death and property damage than rail and truck, spilling less oil than truck, and having more environmental impact than truck or rail (mostly due to impact on habitat; ship transport impacts marine habitat to a large degree). Pipelines
Pipeline transport employee in Michigan. Although the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) has standard baseline incident frequencies to estimate the number of spills, TransCanada altered these assumptions based on improved pipeline design, operation, and safety. Whether these adjustments are justified is debatable as these assumptions resulted in a nearly 10-fold decrease in spill estimates. Given that the pipeline crosses 247 miles of the Ogallala Aquifer, or 14.5% of the entire pipeline length, and the 50-year life of the entire pipeline is expected to have between 11 – 91 spills, approximately 1.6 – 13.2 spills can be expected to occur over