Energy Nowhere

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
  - Bertrand Russell

TransCanada Pipelines cancelled the Energy East pipeline project this week and the environmentalists cheered at what they considered a great victory to their cause.  But I don’t understand why they would do that.  Why would they cheer the demise of the safest and most reliable way of moving crude oil?  What did they expect would happen next?

They surely wouldn’t think that this would stop the use of oil based products any time soon.  Although there are solutions that show promise of making oil burning machinery, primarily automobiles, more efficient they won’t stop the use of gasoline or diesel fuel.  The utopia of a world with only electric cars is still a long way off. And you still have to generate the electricity. There are still things that will not be rendered oil fuel free for a long time.  There is, for example, no realistic means being considered to make electric-only driven ships.  Aircraft engines will still require some form of fossil fuel for a long time.  Heating oil, oil based lubricants and synthetic fabrics are all products of crude oil. 

 

So as long as there is going to be a need for oil there is going to be a need to move it since oil has the nasty habit of not being where you want to use it.  So, without pipelines, how do we do that?  The next best bulk carriers are ships. They are fine as long as you are moving the stuff from one port to another, and of course a great deal of the world’s oil is moved by ship.  But as we have seen, ships have accidents.  Do we remember the Exxon Valdez? Crude oil for the one major refinery in Atlantic Canada is shipped in from Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.  And, of course, ships burn fuel to propel them along.  But our problem in Canada is to move oil from one part of the country to another.  Water transport is a practical impossibility for most of Canada.  So the next choices are rail or road.  Rail is the more efficient of the two, but again trains derail, crash and find other ways of self-destructing usually resulting in large spills or worse.  Who can forget Lac Megantic?   Trucks are even worse.  It takes a great deal of them to move even a train’s worth.  And they are, undoubtedly the worst when it comes to accidents.  Read the stories of truck accidents on Highway 401. So, not one other mode of transport is as efficient and safe as pipelines.  Every other mode of transport uses significant amounts of fuel to get oil from place to place.  Properly built and maintained pipelines using modern technology for monitoring must be considered the safest, most efficient and most environmentally friendly means of transporting crude oil.

So think about it.  Are the environmentalists right or wrong in fighting against pipelines?  You make up your mind, but remember the alternatives.

The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.
  - Edith Sitwell