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This month, the Transportation Safety Board confirmed that more than one million liters of oil were spilled when an eastbound oil train tipped onto a ranch near St. Lazare, Manitoba in mid-February.

It is frequently argued in Alberta that if Canadians don’t want oil trains tipping into their streams and reservoirs, they should probably start approving some pipelines. “We can ship our energy products safely or we can ship them by rail,” wrote Alberta premier Rachel Notley in a 2018 op-ed. Sure enough, her government is now buying up rail cars to ship oil in spite of stonewalled construction on new export pipelines.

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Below, a quick primer on whether pipelines really can keep oil trains off the rails.

There are more oil trains than ever before, and it’s because pipelines are full

In December, 2018 – the last month for which data is available – 1.7 billion litres of oil were exported from Canada on trains. That’s more than 23 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of oil every day, not including oil trains making their deliveries with Canada. There is now more than twice as much oil being moved on Canadian rails as at the time of the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster. The reason is simple: Alberta is producing more oil than can be moved out of the province by pipeline. In mid-2018, Alberta was producing about 4.30 million barrels of oil per day. Alberta’s existing pipelines, meanwhile, can only pump away 3.95 million barrels per day. The result was an extra 350,000 barrels of oil piling up in storage tanks every day. Just like anything else that piles up without anybody to buy it, meanwhile, the glut drove Canadian oil prices shockingly low as compared to those in the U.S. (a phenomenon referred to as “the discount”). If there’s a port or an empty pipeline nearby, shipping oil by train is too inefficient to make economic sense. But when there’s an ocean of cheap oil languishing in Northern Canada with no way to siphon it out, it suddenly makes sense to pony up the extra costs of renting a train in order to flip that cheap oil at U.S. rates.