There are at least four pipelines proposed for the Athabasca oil sands that look as if they will be stalled in various stages of planning for years to come. But oil continues to move out of Alberta via existing infrastructure and, increasingly, railways.
In 2014, 3,500 train cars carried approximately 279,000 tonnes of oil through British Columbia. That’s up from just six cars that carried 251 tonnes to B.C. destinations five years earlier, in 2009.
Andrew Weaver is B.C.’s lone Green Party MLA and the representative for Oak Bay–Gordon Head. “As the desperation to get this stuff to market grows larger, what we are seeing is the move, more and more, towards putting it in railcars,” he told the Straight. “This is remarkable. I knew it had gone up. But to see that it has gone up more than 1,000 times is remarkable.”
The final numbers for 2014 are slightly lower than projected figures the Straight reported on last January. According to Greg Stringham, vice-president of markets and oil sands for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, they mark a slowdown in the rate at which the volume of oil moved by rail has increased in recent years. That trend is likely to continue when numbers eventually come in for 2015, he added.
“Lower world oil prices have really made it more challenging for the economics of rail,” Stringham said in a telephone interview. “So while there was a trend up in our forecast for the last few years, we’ve seen that flatten, if not decrease, this year [2015].”
He noted that across the country, it is only about three percent of oil that’s transported via rail. Stringham also said that the increase in oil by rail that’s occurred over the last five years is not entirely the result of regulatory delays slowing pipeline proposals.
“Rail has been able to provide a niche and also a swing capacity, in the short term, that is quicker to action than the pipeline process,” he explained. “So we have now built into our forecast a small amount of rail on a permanent or ongoing basis.”
In the past, Weaver has attracted criticism for suggesting that if Alberta’s heavy crude is coming to B.C.’s coast, pipelines are a safer means of transport than rail. Today, he argued this shouldn’t be an either-or situation.
“We know that if we want to deal with global warming, 80 percent of global fossil-fuel reserves have to stay in the ground,” he said. “It is folly to continue down this path.”
This article originally appeared in print and online at Straight.com on July 29, 2015