What is the fatality rate for oil pipelines?

Factual Questions
1

Spurred by the thread in GD about the Dakota Access Pipeline, I have a question which I hope can be considered as a factual issue.

How many fatalities can be attributed to shipping oil by pipeline, compared to shipping it by truck or rail?

In Canada, the benchmark is the 2013 Lac Mégantic disaster, where a train loaded with Bakken oil from North Dakota slammed into the centre of the town and exploded:

• The blast radius was estimated at 1 km;

• it killed 47 people who burnt to death (5 of whom were never found :eek: );

• it destroyed the historic town centre: over 30 buildings destroyed in the blast and fire, and another 30-40 buildings so badly damaged that they were slated for demolition;

• initial insurance payouts for the property damage amount to at least $50 million in insurance pay-outs;

• the railway went bankrupt, and in its bankruptcy petition listed an estimated $200 million liability, which would be for both property damages and personal claims by the estates of the 47 people killed;

• people lost their homes and their belongings;

• 115 businesses were affected by the destruction, with a knock-on effect on the lives and incomes of people not directly harmed by the blast.
So, how dangerous are pipelines? I 'm not talking about possible leaks and contamination to the water supply, mentioned in the GD thread. I mean, how dangerous are pipelines to life and safety, compared to the horrendous effects of Lac Mégantic?

2

Nigeria has had problems with them, often caused by thieves trying to steal from them.

2006 Abule Egba pipeline explosion
2008 Ijegun pipeline explosion

Wikipedia also has a list of pipeline accidents, for what it’s worth, but most of them are gas-related.
List of pipeline accidents

3

The comparison is not between the same amount of oil going through a pipeline versus the same amount of oil going by train. Train is more expensive and so less of the oil would be used.

This is not meant to politicize, but rather, assuming that less of the oil would be used in the next 50 years, how many people would be expected to die from its effects on global warming? You’d need to factor that in as well.

4

Hundreds of people have died in pipeline accidents mostly in Africa and the Soviet Union. Here is a site that lists pipeline accidents. It does not differentiate type of materials being transported. From looking at the list most fatal pipeline accidents outside of Africa are caused by natural gas or gasoline pipelines.

5

Why would you assume any such thing?

The cost of transport via train or by pipeline is a trivial fraction of the total cost of production & delivery. The difference between those two transport costs is a triviality of a triviality.

IOW, it will have substantially zero impact on the cost of delivered petroleum product. Further, demand for these products is very inelastic. Even doubling the price has only a few percent impact on demand.
There certainly are valid reasons to want to reduce total fossil fuel consumption to reduce AGW. Both for AGW’s moral impact and its economic impact. Thinking that altering how we transport oil is a lever to move that boulder is not sound thinking. That’s a brush bristle, not a stout beam.

6

I am personally not pro-, and only slightly against, that sort of method of altering fossil fuel consumption. I’m interested in its practical effects. If transportation is more expensive then less fossil fuel will be used. It’s as useful a metric as assuming that there will have to be deaths just because the fuel is transported by train.

7

I’d like to see numbers for things like deaths, non-lethal injuries, spilled barrels, CO2 emissions, etc, per barrel-mile for each transport mode: pipelines, rail, truck, ship. And for each type of fossil fuel: oil (by grade), gasoline, methane, propane, etc.

My initial guess would be trucks are the most worst choice, followed by rail, then ship, and pipelines with the lowest impacts.

8

Thanks for that. I’m going to clarify my question, then: what are the fatality rates for pipelines in Canada and the United States, under those countries’ standards for construction and operation? I’m primarily interested in the current debates in Canada and the US about the use of pipelines to transport petroleum products.

Fatality rates in Africa and the Soviet Union aren’t that relevant to the question of which form of transportation is safer in Canada and the US, unless it is clear that construction and operation standards are uniform in all those countries.

9

Why do you omit contamination as a danger? If X number of people develop cancer because of contaminated groundwater, is that not a threat to life and safety?

I understand that those kinds of numbers are more difficult to quantify, but looking only at explosions doesn’t give you a true comparison.

10

While you might be able to come up with factual numbers, interpreting them might be more difficult. I think most fatalities involved with pipelines and rail transport come from the infrastructure construction rather than later operation. I’ve worked on a few small to moderate sized pipelines being constructed over the past 10 years, and know of a few workers killed or seriously hurt. Accidents during normal operation causing death seem far less common in modern times.

So how do you compare the number of deaths in a new pipeline construction project vs those from the construction of the railway which happened 100 years ago when safety standards were very different? It would be easier to ignore construction and just use current operational statistics, but again I think you’ll be ignoring a significant proportion of the overall fatalities involved in both transport methods.

11

Looking through here, it appears that pipeline accidents are not rare, but they’re rarely fatal, and usually not super-destructive either. Most are also natural gas pipeline issues, not crude oil.

The big question is whether say… 40 years of dinky pipeline accidents is, in the aggregate, more destructive overall than an equivalent time period worth of oil transport accidents. That’s a hard one to quantify.

12

First, what is the line going to carry?
Liquid? Gas?
Liquid, crude oil or refined products?

AS I understand the safety argument being made in Dakota, ( leave the burial sites, Indian land & treaty’s, etc., lets just go with danger to people physically. ) is all about contamination of water.

So lets spill 24 hours of oil because the safety shut offs are slow or what ever.

Oily ducks & fish aside, how much is the water drawn to make drinking water, irrigation water, water that can make people sick or dead actually a problem?
How often is a cleanup person harmed or killed?

If it is a products line, different stuff goes through most of then at different times. Seldom are they dedicated to only one type & class of product.

Gasoline is a worse danger than kerosene, etc.

High pressure gas is the most dangerous.

I have patrolled a lot of pipe line miles of all kinds but I do not know what crude oil would do to a big river as far as contamination is concerned? Pipe line breaks/leaks are no where near like the big ones off shore. No point in trying to compare them to even a nasty pipeline break in regards volume, death, after effect, etc…

This stuff dumped into rivers today scare me more when I’m downstream, polluted water, human waste water, industry discharges, etc. They still make drinking water from those rivers.

So, even though there is a lot of political mud throwing, what are the real world effects of a big leak into that river at that point?

PS: The largest leak I ever found was 50,000 barrels of mostly gasoline, in a swamp, ( they knew they had a bad leak but did not know where it was ) and the smallest was three drops on some sand under an exposed line that I saw sun glint off the first drop of oil just as the leak started & I flew past that point. That was a fun one to call in.

There is even better monitoring now with more remote controlled shut offs that a human does not have to physically have to go shut as it was back in my patrol days.

Any facts on the effects of an actual spill and how large does it have to be to start killing people?

13

Actually the hybrid and electric car/SUV boom happened at a time after a steep increase in price. It is not very inelastic but actually very elastic, but the change is slow. Inelastic means no or little change, but the change is certainly in the minds of those buying cars. It just comes down to economics, do you buy that efficient vehicle now because prices are up or do you wait till it makes economic sense.

You view of the inelasticity of this market is short sighted. (and the oil companies know this very well)

14

Agree 100% that the market is much more elastic in the long term vice in the short.

There are a couple of different “longs” involved though. The WAG 10% of people who replace cars every couple years can change their vehicles between SUVs, subcompacts, and EVs quickly. But the half-life of the US passenger vehicle fleet is WAG 8 years. So maybe 16 years to replace 75% of the passenger vehicles.

The turnover in the commercial vehicle market, both short haul delivery vans and long haul 18 wheelers is slower, more like 10-12 year half-lives.

Except in eras of artificially low interest rates, commercial aircraft are 8-10 year half-life.

15

Hit enter too soon then lost my continuation post twice. :smack:

Bottom line: over 5 years, demand is very inelastic. Mostly people and businesses just cut spending elsewhere to afford whatever fuel costs.

Over 100 years it’s quite elastic. At considerable capital cost.

Which timeframe is relevant to the topic at hand?

16

I think I’ve finally found something to address the OP

The data from the US looks more detailed than the stuff from the National Energy Board.

From Intermodal safety in the transport of oil

17

I dunno. I would expect most injuries to be associated with the construction and repair of pipelines. Which to me is w hole different catetgory of people than people who might be hurt or killed in a vehicle accident.

I would also expect that casualty rates by industry for what you’re looking for would NOT include railroad engineers, seamen, etc.

18

Your quote address employees and contractors associated with the pipeline, but doesn’t consider bystanders, which (according to the incidents listed above) are usually the overwhelming majority of casualties. Likewise transport by rail, since none of Lac-Mégantic’s casualties were associated in any way with the oil company or the railroad.

19

Related to this discussion, check out the Vice Motherboard story on the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline that runs under the straits of Mackinac:

Vice YouTube