External Costs of Transporting Petroleum Products: Evidence from Shipments of Crude Oil from North Dakota by Pipelines and Rail

Karen Clay, Akshaya Jha, Nicholas Muller, and Randall Walsh
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Randall Phillip Walsh and Nicholas Z. Muller

The Energy Journal, 2019, vol. Volume 40, issue Number 1

Abstract: Using data for crude oil transported out of North Dakota in 2014, this paper constructs new estimates of the air pollution, greenhouse gas, and spill and accident costs from long-distance movement of petroleum products by rail and pipelines. Our analysis has three main findings. First, air pollution and greenhouse gas costs are nearly twice as large for rail as for pipelines. Second, air pollution and greenhouse gas costs are much larger than estimates of spill and accidents costs. Third, air pollution and greenhouse gas costs of transporting fuel by rail and pipelines are one-fifth to one-tenth of the costs of combusting fuel in motor vehicles. These results suggest that the policy debate surrounding crude oil transportation may be putting too much relative weight on spills and accidents, while overlooking a far more serious external cost: air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

JEL-codes: F0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejarticle.aspx?id=3277 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to IAEE members and subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: External Costs of Transporting Petroleum Products: Evidence from Shipments of Crude Oil from North Dakota by Pipelines and Rail (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aen:journl:ej40-1-clay

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejsearch.aspx

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Energy Journal from International Association for Energy Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by David Williams ().