Technical and Economical Comparison between Golmud Lhasa Pipeline Transportation and Truck Transportation

Before the Golmud-Lhasa Pipeline was available the oil demand in Tibet depended fully on truck transportation through Qinhai-Tibet Highway, some 2500 trucks were put to use one year, but failed to meet the requirement.Since 1976, when the said pipeline was put into operation, this bottleneck disappeared.Over 18 year operation, the pipeline transported to Lhasa over 2, 000, 000 tons of various kinds of oil products, which revealed considerable social and economical benefits as well as its superiority over truck transportation.In order to make comparison, the costs for these two transportation means are analyzed: To transport 2, 000, 000 tons of oil products from Golmud to Lhasa, the total cost for trucks is as much as 5.6 billion yuan(RMB), whereas that for pipeline is only L 123 billion yuan.Taking account of living and other expenses of the employees concerned, the cost for pipeline transportation makes up only 20% of that for trucks, that is to say, 4.477 billion yuan, 6.4 times the investment for this pipeline is saved due to the Golmud-Lhasa pipeline.Comparing with pipeline, truck transportation suffers from great loss of light component, excessive large/small respiration, contamination, excessive water content, incapability to transport special oil product, etc.By contrast, pipeline is capable of meeting the oil demand in Tibet, disregarding the adverse envirenment of high altitude, varied topography, low temperature, etc.