Three million gallons of Bakken crude burning in rural West Virginia after an oil train derails in a snowstorm ought to underscore the environmental safety of replacing rail cars with the Keystone XL pipeline.
One of the reasons President Obama says he'll veto the Keystone pipeline bill that, as a result of last November's GOP electoral gusher, has found its way to his desk is that it will only carry Canadian crude to foreign markets and is not worth jeopardizing the environment.
Two things are wrong with that argument.
The first is that Keystone XL will also bring Bakken crude to the American market, accelerating the oil boom from fracking in the shale formation centered on North Dakota. This will make North America energy independent and the rest of the world less dependent on Middle Eastern oil, a matter of no small significance.
Second, as the State Department's multiple reviews point out, the Keystone XL pipeline itself poses no serious risk to the environment, no more than the tens of thousands of miles of pipeline that already crisscross the U.S., including one from Canada, all operating quite safely.
As the Heritage Foundation notes, an earlier approval by Hillary Clinton's State Department concluded: "The pipeline posed minimal environmental risk to soil, wetlands, water resources, vegetation, fish and wildlife, and creates few greenhouse-gas emissions. Keystone XL also met 57 specific pipeline safety-standard requirements created by the State Department and the Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration."
The State Department has also concluded that by not building Keystone we will accomplish nothing environmentally, since the crude will still be extracted from Alberta's oil sands and simply shipped by another route, as Canada is already planning to do.
So even if Obama vetoes the Keystone XL bill and the veto is not overridden, both Bakken and Canadian crude will find their way to market.
The only thing the president would accomplish would be to, er, derail a pipeline that would bring up to 830,000 barrels of oil per day to our Gulf Coast refineries and directly create 20,000 truly shovel-ready jobs.
The train that derailed about 30 miles outside of Charleston, W.Va., was carrying Bakken crude from North Dakota. In addition to the explosions and fire, at least one tanker found its way into a nearby Kanawha River tributary. Two water treatment plants had to be closed. Hundreds of families were evacuated, but property damage was minimal thanks to the relatively remote location of the derailment.
As more oil flows out of North Dakota, more of these accidents and potential catastrophes will happen. Two days before the West Virginia wreck, 29 cars of a 100-car Canadian National Railway train carrying Bakken crude derailed about 50 miles south of Timmins, Ontario, spilling oil and catching fire.
A little more than a year ago, Casselton, N.D., had a near-brush with tragedy after a train of tank cars carrying crude oil derailed, resulting in fiery explosions and a call from the town's mayor for a re-examination of how such fuel is transported across the United States.
Rail shipments of crude have increased from 9,500 carloads in 2008 to more than 435,000 in 2013, driven largely by the Bakken boom. Limited pipeline capacity in the region forces more than 70% of the crude to be shipped to the refineries by rail, increasing the dangers.
There doesn't seem too much of a debate that pipelines are safer than rail shipments. The right-leaning Manhattan Institute says trains spill 33 times more oil than pipelines, while the left-leaning Brookings Institution says the evidence that railroads are far less safe than pipelines is "overwhelming."
So is the evidence of the economic need for the Keystone XL pipeline. Sign the bill, Mr. President.
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