After the Senate fell one vote short of approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline Tuesday, Sen. Mitch McConnell, soon to be the Senate majority leader, vowed that another vote “will be an early item on the agenda in the next Congress.”
Since the Keystone XL issue will soon be back, note that even one of its most ardent supporters, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., doesn’t buy the argument made by Republican proponents that building it will ease freight railroad congestion.
Bakken crude oil is moved by rail from her state to refineries in other parts of the country, but has caused backups for shippers of other products.
The long-run solution, Heitkamp said after the Senate vote, is “you’ve got to build larger rail capacity. I am not someone who has ever said that the Keystone Pipeline will take crude off the rails. It won’t. Our markets are east and west [not north-south, as Keystone XL would run] and it would be extraordinarily difficult to build pipelines east and west.”
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who voted “no” on Tuesday, has complained that the congestion on the BNSF line in the western part of the country has caused problems for apple and cherry marketers in her state.
That congestion is caused in large part by oil traffic, she said.
“When you have that much of the rail dominated by oil,” it has the effect of “pushing other people” such as cherry and apple marketers “off the market” and “we’re looking from solutions from the rail industry.”
But she said Tuesday that Keystone XL, which would take at least some oil off the rails and put it into pipelines, “is not going to have a major impact” in reducing rail congestion in the Northwest.
“Those trains [carrying Bakken crude] will still go through Washington state,” Cantwell said, even if Keystone XL is built. “You would still have lot of train traffic of Bakken through the Northwest…. You’re hitting practically every major metropolitan area in our state.”
One reason Bakken crude is moving from North Dakota to Washington is that it’s the fifth biggest refining state in the country with five refineries and with big gasoline consumer markets in Seattle and all along Interstate 5, which runs from British Columbia to California.
Bakken oil is moving on railroads through environmentally sensitive and scenic areas such as the Columbia River Gorge which divides Oregon and Washington, 18 oil trains a week, according to the Portland Oregonian.
And that area would be hard for emergency cleanup crews to reach if there ever were a spill or accident, Cantwell noted.
