Transporting oil by pipelines is more than twice as safe as using rail, and marine tankers are safer still with a markedly improved safety record over the past 40 years, finds a new study released by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian policy think-tank.
“The evidence is clear — building new pipelines and shipping oil by tanker is the safest and most environmentally responsible way to get Canadian oil to global markets,” said Kenneth Green, Fraser Institute’s senior director of energy and natural resource studies and co-author of ‘Safety First: Intermodal Safety for Oil and Gas Transportation’.
The study updates previous research that finds pipelines are 2.5 times less likely to experience a spill than rail, with an occurrence rate of 0.03 accidents per million barrels of oil shipped by pipeline between 2004 and 2015, compared to 0.08 accidents per million barrels of oil shipped by rail over the same period.
Marine tankers, by comparison, have a spill rate of less than 0.001 per million barrels of oil shipped.
Indeed, while oil shipped by tanker has increased from 1.4 billion tonnes in 1970 to 2.9 billion tonnes in 2015, the amount of spillage has plummeted by 98 per cent. Specifically, in 1970, there was 383,000 tonnes of oil released in spills globally compared to just 6,000 tonnes in 2016.
“Canadians will benefit greatly from increased oil exports, which should be transported in the safest way possible. That means building new pipelines to Canada’s coasts and shipping oil by marine tanker around the world,” Green said.
Since the mid-1990s there has not been a single major spill from oil tankers or other vessels in Canadian waters. One recent study conducted by the federal government on marine oil spill preparedness estimated that a major spill of over 10,000 tonnes was exceedingly rare and likely to only occur once every 242 years. Likewise, a spill of 100 to 1,000 tonnes is expected to occur once every 69.2 years.
Marine safety has also improved dramatically since the 1970s. For example, when comparing the number of spills in the 1970s to the 2010s (up to 2016) using international data, the number of spills between 7 and 700 tonnes has decreased from 543 to 35 and in this same period the number of large spills (>700 tonnes) has declined from 245 to 12. The amount of oil spilled has also dropped dramatically, falling from three million tonnes in the 1970s to only 39,000 tonnes in the 2010s.
Further details may be found by reading the report