Way Too Much Today: The New York Times Reporter Has It Wrong -- It Does Not Cost More To Ship By Rail Than By Pipeline

I'm going to be going off the net in a few minutes. I am overwhelmed with stories that need to be posted. So quickly, which I will come back to:

The New York Times is reporting:

Gizem Akhan, 24, was about to begin her final year studying the culinary arts at Yeditepe University in Istanbul. Tomasz Dziemianczuk, 36, took a vacation from his job as a cultural adviser at the University of Gdansk in Poland that has now unexpectedly turned into an unpaid leave of absence. 

Dmitri Litvinov and the others are just three of the 30 people aboard a Greenpeace International ship, the Arctic Sunrise, who are now confined in separate cells in the far northern city of Murmansk after staging a high-seas protest last month against oil exploration in the Arctic. All face criminal charges that could result in years in prison as a result of having grossly underestimated Russia’s readiness to assert — and even expand — its sovereignty in a region potentially rich with natural resources.

The vigorous legal response by the authorities, including the seizure of the ship itself, appears to have caught Greenpeace off guard and left the crew’s families and friends worried that the consequences of what the activists considered a peaceful protest could prove much graver than any expected when they set out. 

And speaking of unintended consequences, The New York Times is also reporting:

Over the past two years, environmentalists have chained themselves to the White House fence and otherwise coalesced around stopping the Keystone XL pipeline as their top priority in the fight against global warming.  

But even if President Obama rejects the pipeline, it might not matter much. Oil companies are already building rail terminals to deliver oil from western Canada to the United States, and even to Asia.

Since July, plans have been announced for three large loading terminals in western Canada with the combined capacity of 350,000 barrels a day — equivalent to roughly 40 percent of the capacity of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that is designed to bring oil from western Alberta to refineries along the Gulf Coast. 

Over all, Canada is poised to quadruple its rail-loading capacity over the next few years to as much as 900,000 barrels a day, up from 180,000 today.

The acceleration has come despite a derailment in the lakeside Quebec town of Lac-Megantic in July, in which a runaway oil train bound for a refinery in eastern Canada exploded, killing dozens of people and bankrupting the railway company. That accident and others more recently have renewed concerns about the safety of transporting oil by rail, and given an added argument to some who favor the Keystone XL pipeline.

“They don’t give up,” Jesse Prentice-Dunn, a Sierra Club policy analyst, said of the oil industry. [Nor does the Sierra Club, it should be added.]

If all the new terminals are built, Canada will potentially increase its exports to the United States by more than 20 percent — even if Keystone XL is never built.

Shipping by rail can cost an additional $5 or more per barrel, but oil companies have decided that they cannot afford to wait.

“The indecision on Keystone XL really spawned innovation and mobilized alternatives, and rail is a clear part of the options available to our industry,” said Paul Reimer, senior vice president in charge of transport and marketing at Cenovus Energy, a Canadian oil company that is planning to increase rail shipments from 7,000 barrels a day to as many as 30,000 barrels a day by the end of 2014. 

And much more at the link. The New York Times reporter notes that it costs $5/bbl more to ship by rail than by pipeline....I think that's grossly inaccurate. It is incredibly cheaper (as in less expensive to ship by rail and than by pipeline. When I have time, I might explain. I've explained it before, but it seems some folks still don't get it. A hint: it costs about $85/bbl more to ship by pipeline than by rail.)