With the arrival of the new administration, construction of new oil pipelines has returned. But crude-by-rail is an alternative that offers something pipelines can’t: flexibility in a perpetually volatile market.
After three years of planning, nearly $4 billion in capital investment and a year of legal disputes and protests, the Dakota Access Pipeline began transporting crude oil from the Bakken Shale region of North Dakota to the Gulf Coast last month. The move came just two months after President Trump issued the permits for the even-more-contested Keystone XL pipeline, which, if completed, would link the Canadian tar sands to U.S. consumption and export markets.
