Railroad transportation of crude oil in Canada: Developing long-term forecasts, and evaluating the impact of proposed pipeline projects

Abstract

Rail crude oil shipments have witnessed a steady increase over the past decade, which underscore the long-term viability of this transport mode. Although incidents involving these shipments could be catastrophic, having link-level information could be useful for designing appropriate emergency response network and responding to such episodes. We present a data-driven methodology that makes use of analytics to estimate the amount of crude oil on different rail-links in Canada until 2030. The resulting analyses facilitated identifying high-risk links around Canada based on the current practice of the railroad industry, and to suggest that incurring marginally higher transportation costs could reduce network risk. In addition, the availability of the proposed pipeline infrastructure would change the supply and demand location configurations over the forecast horizon, with the maximum changes to the current crude oil traffic flow pattern stemming from the completion of the Energy East pipeline project.