AI Analysis: Crude oil and petroleum products movements, by mode of transport and by product type, monthly

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada Table 25100077 tracks monthly pipeline-based movements of crude oil and petroleum products across Canada and the US from January 2020 to January 2026, encompassing 4,532 data points across 162 unique origin-destination-product series. The dataset is heavily right-skewed, with a mean volume of ~4.26 million cubic metres versus a median of just ~535,000 cubic metres, reflecting a small number of very high-volume corridors dominating overall throughput. A strong positive correlation (r=0.896) between Crude Oil & Equivalents and Hydrocarbon Gas Liquids suggests tightly linked supply chain dynamics across Canadian energy transport networks.

Key Findings

• All 4,532 recorded movements are pipeline-based, covering 9 shipping regions and 9 receiving regions across Canada and the US, with 162 unique origin-destination-product combinations tracked monthly.
• The distribution is strongly right-skewed: the mean (~4.26M cubic metres) is nearly 8x the median (~535K cubic metres), with the top movements reaching a maximum of 58.35 million cubic metres.
• The middle 50% of movement volumes fall between ~240,150 and ~1,772,272 cubic metres (IQR of ~1.53M), indicating that most routes carry relatively modest volumes while a few corridors handle outsized flows.
• Crude Oil & Equivalents and Hydrocarbon Gas Liquids (HGLs) exhibit a strong positive correlation of r=0.896, meaning these two product categories rise and fall in tandem on a month-to-month basis.
• Outlier analysis identified 35 anomalous records (~0.77% of valid data) using z-score thresholds, with some anomalies potentially linked to COVID-19 disruptions in 2020 and subsequent energy market volatility.
• Only two product categories are tracked — Crude Oil & Equivalents and HGLs/Refined Petroleum Products — yet their volume distributions differ markedly, with crude oil movements showing higher peaks and more extreme outliers.
• The dataset spans 73 monthly periods from January 2020 to January 2026, providing a robust multi-year baseline that captures pandemic-era disruptions, recovery trends, and seasonal patterns in Canadian petroleum transport.