[TIRADE]

Those studies usually look at only a binary comparison. And given the history of them it shouldn't take more than a week or 2 to gather the references and rewrite their summaries under your own company's name. PROFIT!

Do any ever put the risk in perspective - how bad is it in the universe of problems you could have with oil/petroleum product transport? For instance, there's a difference in "danger" when considering it as individuals vs. communities. Here's a possible place to start. There certainly can be arguments about where to put things on each list, but they're presented mainly to think about regarding the Big Picture.

Most to Least Risk for individuals (short-term, small-scale thinking):

- Wreck individual light vehicle (seems like around 20% of significant wrecks in the CHP log end up as fires, anecdotally)
- Small fuel containers unrestrained in a car or light truck
- Tank truck (small-medium boom; melt down your overpass)
- General merchandise train (small groups of tank cars in mixed traffic - medium to large boom, and can happen almost anywhere)
- Unit tank trains (seldom switched between origin and destination - large to very large boom, though not as many routes and terminals as for mixed traffic)
- Pipeline (seldom happens, but if it does it's big ... and a spill is a mess; limited locations, but little useful public information about location & type; Do You Feel Lucky?)
- Tanker barge/ship wreck or explosion (rare but big messes; who cares if you're in Kansas?)
- Don't Move It (use it at the origin and transmit power as electricity)
- Don't Touch It (leave it in the ground)

Most to Least Risk for communities (longer-term thinking):

- Unit tank trains (if something happens, it can get big in a hurry; self-limiting, though)
- Pipelines (if something happens, it gets very big very quickly, and keeps going until somebody figures out how to shut off the flow)
... those two are probably about equal, really: train problems happen more often (though usually not catastrophic), but if a pipeline goes you have a REAL problem ...
- Don't Touch It (leaving it in the ground, taken to the extreme, means no oil for energy or as a raw material, which has huge global impacts)
- Don't Move It (can still produce pollution that's harmful far away or globally)
- Tanker ship wreck/explosion (rare but big messes)
... generally not considered in risk analyses, but worth thinking about ...
- Tank truck (blow one in a really bad spot and your town can be disrupted for a few days)
... after those, the rest are probably insignificant at the community level ...

Short-term, Don't Touch It seems like the best move (thank you, Greenpeace and others). But we just aren't there yet; we need that energy and the raw materials. And building an industrial complex around the oil wells really doesn't work well - they're in inconvenient locations for that.

So the best way to move it around probably is a pipeline, if it's available on the route you need. Many studies have shown that. But they're very expensive and time-consuming to build, and not without their own problems. Do you want one in your backyard? It's downhill from there.

Unit oil trains are really pretty good. It's just that, like pipelines and tanker ships, they can make a really big mess. And problems seem to occur disturbingly (but not statistically) often with the trains. But they can bring a small shipload to nearly anyplace in North America, at moderate short-term cost, which just isn't possible with pipelines.

Small groups of tank cars running in general service have problems more often, but usually not big ones. Mostly it's minor stuff that happens in yards and nobody (except the employee(s) dealing with it) never even hears about it (nor do they need to). And even if one does spill/burn/explode the quantity available is relatively small - several truckloads per tank car - so the damage is limited.

Trucks are relatively likely to have accidents: in California at least there seems to be at least one big tanker truck wreck, with damaging fire or major spill, a month. At least a few smaller spills a week. But that's in a lot of vehicle miles traveled, and the truck can't carry enough product to do more than local damage - though if it's your overpass or Lexus that melts down it can seem bigger. And it does add up, but because no individual incident is very big nobody notices.

Then there's the small stuff that happens to individuals. It happens often, but usually only to one or a few people. It's good for a quick hit on the evening news, on a slow news day. But if you add it up you get a pretty big number. Nobody notices or cares, because it'll always be "somebody else" that has a problem.

Again, where's the study that looks at the whole picture?
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