Sorting through pipeline fact and fiction

BURNABY (NEWS1130) – As the fight over Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain expansion continues, there is plenty of information about pipelines floating around online. So how do you sort through it all and separate informed from uninformed opinion?

One common pro-pipeline argument is that tripling the capacity of the Trans Mountain route and an upgrade to its Puget Sound line will mean less pressure to increase oil-by-rail into the Pacific Northwest.

Policy director Eric de Place at the Sightline Institute says that’s not the case. “There’s no reason to think that the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline would offset the crude oil coming by rail from the Bakken region [in North Dakota].”

“Those are two very different kinds of oil, very different supply lines, and very different economics. They’re probably just additive to one another, they probably compete in so many different markets,” he tells News1130, adding more oil-by-rail facilities are being planned for Oregon and Washington.

There has also been debate over whether the Trans Mountain upgrade would replace some of the tanker traffic currently heading down the West Coast from the Alaskan oilfields.

“Right now, the majority of oil that is refined in the Puget Sound region comes from the Alaskan oilfields and it comes by tanker off the West Coast of BC and then turns left into the Strait of Juan de Fuca to reach its refinery destinations. There’s not too much reason to think Trans Mountain will mean a decrease in that traffic. Even if there was, what would happen is you would replace all of those tankers with outbound tankers, and you’d probably drastically increase the number of tanker vessels you see on the water,” says de Place.

Despite many bloggers and others using readily available data from the oil industry, de Place says many of the arguments being fueled by those numbers don’t hold water.