When green isn't so green

It cracks me up that your average Branch Gorevidian believes that stopping the Keystone pipeline construction is somehow better for the environment than filling a tanker half way across the world and delivering the oil to an American refinery.

Or, as it pertains, to haul Canadian oil south on rail cars............

On any given week, three to seven CP Rail trains laden with crude oil from the North Dakota Bakken field whisk across North America, bypassing the pipeline bottlenecks in mid-continent that are depressing oil prices and unaffected by the noise in Washington, D.C., that is holding back the Keystone XL pipeline.

It’s a roaring business. In 2009, when Calgary-based Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. started dabbling in crude oil transportation, it moved 500 of its black barrel-shaped cars out of the basin. Last year, its oil trains carried 13,000 cars and soon CP could be moving 70,000 cars or more a year out of the North Dakota Bakken tight-oil field alone.

With each tank car containing 650 barrels of oil, that’s 126,000 barrels a day — a significant pipeline on rail.

“We think that’s foreseeable in the not-too-distant future, and we think based on what we are doing now there is potential above that,” Tracy Robinson, CP’s energy and merchandise vice-president, said in an interview.

It’s not the pipeline on rail that some were envisioning some years ago, when Canada’s major railway companies, Montreal-based Canadian National Railway Co. and CP, started looking for ways to get a piece of the growing Alberta oil sands by offering alternative transportation.

Because, afterall, we all know that there has never been a railroad accident.

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