Monthly Archives: August 2016

Derailment, Positive Train Control, Rail industry, Rail Safety

FED REPORT: Many railroads making little progress on installing safety systems required by congress

Repost from the Recorder, Greenfield, MA
[Editor:  Important for Benicia as we consider permitting Valero Crude by Rail: “Progress varies considerably by railroad. For example, BNSF has equipped 4,309 of its 5,000 locomotives, but Union Pacific has equipped only 13 of its 5,656 locomotives.”  If permitted, Valero would be served by Union Pacific trains.  – RS]

Railroads show little progress on key safety technology

By Joan Lowy, Associated Press, Wednesday, August 17, 2016
In this Wednesday, May 13, 2015 photo, emergency personnel work at the scene of a derailment in Philadelphia of an Amtrak train headed to New York. Many commuter and freight railroads have made little progress installing safety technology designed to prevent deadly collisions and derailments despite a mandate from Congress, according to a government report released Wednesday. AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File

WASHINGTON — Many commuter and freight railroads have made little progress installing safety technology designed to prevent deadly collisions and derailments despite a mandate from Congress, according to a government report released Wednesday.

The technology, called positive train control or PTC, uses digital radio communications, GPS and signals alongside tracks to monitor train positions. It can automatically stop or slow trains to prevent them from disobeying signals, derailing due to excessive speed, colliding with another train or entering track that is off-limits.

The Federal Railroad Administration report shows that while some railroads have made substantial progress, others have yet to equip a single locomotive or track segment with the technology, or install a single radio tower.

Congress passed a law in 2008 giving railroads seven years to put the technology in place, and last year extended that deadline for three more years after railroads said they were unable to meet the first deadline. The law extending the deadline to Dec. 31, 2018, also allows the railroad administration to grant additional extensions for two more years to railroads that have installed PTC but are still testing the systems.

Railroads shouldn’t wait for the deadline to complete their work on PTC, said Sarah Feinberg, head of the railroad administration.

“Every day that passes without PTC, we risk adding another preventable accident to a list that is already too long,” she said in a statement.

So far, PTC is in operation on nine percent of freight route miles and 22 percent of passenger train miles, the report said.

Freight railroads have equipped 34 percent of their locomotives, installed 73 percent of their radio towers and completed 11 percent of their track segments. Passenger railroads have equipped 29 percent of their locomotives, installed 46 percent of their radio towers, and completed 12 percent of their track segments.

But progress varies considerably by railroad. For example, BNSF has equipped 4,309 of its 5,000 locomotives, but Union Pacific has equipped only 13 of its 5,656 locomotives.

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, which operates commuter trains in the Philadelphia region, has equipped all its locomotives, installed all its radio towers and completed all its track segments. But nearby New Jersey Transit Rail, which carries an average of 308,000 passengers on weekdays, hasn’t equipped any locomotives, installed any radio towers or completed any track segments.

The report also gave zeros in each of those categories to New York’s largest commuter railroads, the Metro-North and the Long Island railroads, which each carry about 300,000 passengers on weekdays. In 2013, a speeding Metro-North train derailed while going around a curve in the Bronx. Four people were killed and more than 60 injured. The National Transportation Safety Board said the accident could have been prevented if PTC had been in operation.

The report is based on information supplied by the railroads.

The report “is an overall summary that does not convey the progress we have achieved,” said Nancy Snyder, a spokeswoman for New Jersey Transit. She noted that the railroad has acquired spectrum rights, equipped four “prototype vehicles” for testing and installed five antennas in a demonstration area, among other actions.

Beth DeFalco, a spokeswoman for the Metro-North and Long Island railroads, said the railroads have done extensive work on PTC and hope to see benefits from the technology as soon as next year.

The NTSB has urged railroads to install positive train control or earlier train control technologies for more than four decades. The board says that over that time it has investigated at least 145 PTC-preventable accidents in which about 300 people were killed and 6,700 injured.

More recently, the board has said PTC could have prevented the head-on collision of two BNSF trains in June near Panhandle, Texas. Three railroad employees were killed in the crash. The technology also could have prevented the derailment of a speeding Amtrak train in Philadelphia last year. Eight people were killed and over 200 injured in the crash.

Commuter railroads have spent $950 million on PTC so far, but the total cost is estimated to be at least $3.48 billion, said Richard A. White, acting president of the American Public Transportation Association. The White House requested Congress provide $1.25 billion in the coming 2017 federal budget year to help commuter railroads with PTC; House and Senate spending bills allocate only $199 million.

“Despite this funding dilemma, the industry is moving forward with this top safety priority,” White said in a statement.

Fracking, Local Regulation, Oil drilling, Oil industry lobby, Oil producers

Oil firms dig deep to battle Colo. anti-fracking initiatives

Repost from The Coloradoan

Significant funding gap in Colorado fracking fight

By Jacy Marmaduke, August 18, 2016 11:17 a.m. MDT
Anti-fracking protesters
Anti-fracking protesters

Committees fighting proposed Colorado ballot measures that would limit fracking have raked in about $15 million in donations this year, more than 35 times the contributions of groups backing the measures.

About 90 percent of the anti-ballot measure donations have come from energy companies, including $10.5 million from Anadarko Petroleum Corporation and Noble Energy alone.

“We’ve never seen a number like this from the opposition,” said Luis Toro, executive director of Colorado Ethics Watch, the state government watchdog group that released the numbers confirmed by the Coloradoan. “It shows that (businesses) are ready to spend a lot of money in the best interest of the company’s bottom line.”

In contrast, individual donations of less than $1,000 have been the primary fuel for the pro-ballot measure efforts, bolstered by support from U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, his father and the executive director of the fundraising committees. The pro-ballot measure committees have received about $424,000 in donations this year.

Petitioners submitted signatures for proposed ballot measures 75 and 78 on Aug. 8, the day they were due. The Secretary of State will declare the signatures sufficient or insufficient by Sept. 8. If the office confirms petitioners collected about 98,500 valid signatures for each measure, they’ll appear in the November election.

Measure 75 would amend the state constitution to allow local control of oil and gas development, effectively overturning the Colorado Supreme Court’s denial of Fort Collins’ fracking moratorium and Longmont’s fracking ban.

Measure 78 would amend the state constitution to increase setbacks for oil and gas development from 500 feet to 2,500 feet from occupied structures. The measure would also require a 2,500-foot setback from “areas of special concern,” a category that includes most water sources and riparian areas, parks, sports fields, playgrounds and public open spaces.

The current setback of 500 feet is about the length of 1 1/2 football fields. The proposed setback of 2,500 feet is about a half-mile. It would apply only to new development — but the ballot measure includes reentry of existing wells in its definition of “new development.”

Two committees are working on each side of the proposed ballot measures: Yes for Health and Safety Over Fracking and Yes for Local Control Over Oil and Gas are on the pro-ballot measure side. Protecting Colorado’s Environment, Economy and Energy Independence and Vote No on 75/78 are on the anti-ballot measure side.

About 30 percent pro-ballot donations were in the form of services from organizations like Food and Water Watch and Greenpeace. Those services are assigned cash values for record-keeping purposes.

“A successful ballot initiative usually costs at least a million dollars,” Toro said. “That might be an indication of where they’re headed.”

The committees could see a cash infusion if they’re approved for the ballot, Toro added. Committee representatives weren’t available for comment.

The anti-ballot measure committees have received about $15 million in donations this year, not including about $746,000 Protect Colorado had on-hand on Jan. 1. About 10 percent of those donations were in the form of services.

“These measures are so extreme and such a threat to Colorado’s economy that we’ve got the commitments to spend $24 million to fight them,” Protect Colorado spokeswoman Karen Crummy said. “We’ve been very upfront about that from the beginning.”

The anti-ballot measure committees have spent 20 times more than the pro-ballot measure groups as of Aug. 1 — $5 million versus about $250,000, according to data from the Secretary of State’s office. Also as of Aug. 1, the anti-ballot measure side had roughly $9.1 million to the opposition’s $43,000.

Lists of top monetary donors for each side of the issue give you a good idea of how their fundraising has taken shape.

Top monetary donors for pro-ballot measure committees:

  1. Patricia Olson (founder of both committees): $60,300
  2. J. Christopher Hormel (Boulder philanthropist): $60,000
  3. (tie) Lush Cosmetics: $25,000
  4. (tie) Jared Polis: $25,000
  5. (tie) Fracking Fund of the New World Foundation: $25,000
  6. (tie) Stephen Schutz (physicist, greeting card designer, Jared Polis’ father): $25,000

Top donors make up 52 percent of 2016 contributions.

Top monetary donors for anti-ballot measure committees

  1. Anadarko Petroleum Corporation: $5.5 million
  2. Noble Energy: $5 million
  3. PDC Energy: $750,000
  4. Synergy Resources Corporation: $650,000
  5. Bayswater Exploration and Production: $500,000
  6. Whiting Oil and Gas Corporation: $300,000

Top donors make up 85 percent of 2016 contributions.

The American Petroleum Institute, the national trade group representing the oil and gas industry, funded about $1.1 million worth of consulting and other services for Vote No on 75/78 but isn’t on this list because the donations were considered non-monetary.

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Rail industry lobby

Maine’s Right-to-Know Advisory Committee to reconsider hiding oil train data

Repost from the Penobscot Pilot

State to reconsider hiding oil train data

By By Dave Sherwood, Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, August 17, 2016 – 5:15pm
Photo courtesy of Roy Luck. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license / Wikimedia

AUGUSTA — The state committee charged with promoting transparency in government is asking lawmakers to overhaul a 2015 law that made secret information about the transportation of crude oil and other hazardous materials by railroad through Maine.

The legislature’s Right-to-Know Advisory Committee voted Wednesday to send a letter to the Judiciary Committee recommending that it reconsider the controversial law in order to ensure that the government is not keeping railroad data secret unnecessarily.

The legislation in question, enacted in October 2015, initially prevented officials from divulging information that it had previously provided to the public about rail shipments of hazardous materials passing through the state. The law took effect more than two years after a runaway oil train killed 47 people and leveled the town of Lac-Megantic, Quebec, just across the border from Maine.

Lawmakers and railroad lobbyists said secrecy was needed to protect confidential business information and prevent terrorist attacks, but transparency advocates argued the public has the right to know what the trains are carrying.

Committee members sided Wednesday with transparency advocates, asking lawmakers in the letter to carefully weigh the public’s interest in having access to the information against potential safety concerns or business interests.

“We recommend the Judiciary Committee consider submitting a committee bill…in a manner that allows the most meaningful participation by stakeholders, state and local government entities and other members of the public,” states the letter, which will be submitted to lawmakers before the upcoming legislative session begins in December.

Eroding FOAA

The controversy over the oil train data underscores the gradual erosion of Maine’s 40-year old Freedom of Access Act, which was originally intended to ensure citizens have access to government information but has become increasingly riddled with loopholes.

As of 2015, state legislators had approved at least 450 exceptions to the law, each of which allows the government to keep certain information secret from the public. Last year’s railroad law added nearly 200 pages of chemicals shipped by rail to the growing list of secrets kept by the government, according to a memo filed with the committee by the Department of Environmental Protection in July.

Environmental officials questioned whether the exception was necessary.

“The additional burden of reviewing this list….provides no increase in safety for the citizens of Maine,” DEP officials wrote to the Right-to-Know advisory committee.

Right-to-Know Committee member Judy Meyer, the executive editor of the Lewiston Sun Journal, noted in July that it was ironic that the law made secret the contents of railroad cars that any citizen could observe passing through a railroad crossing.

“To make private these records that are rolling through our city streets is odd to me,” Meyer said.

The committee’s recommendation to clarify the law follows a February 2016 investigation by the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting that showed lawmakers who approved the bill repeatedly bypassed safeguards designed to prioritize the public’s right-to-know over private business interests.

Following a Freedom of Access Act request by the Center, environmental officials consulted with the Attorney General and once again began providing railroad data to the public, but in July admitted there was still confusion over the law’s intent.

“The Department…seeks to clarify the exact information that is exempted by the law,” according to the DEP memo submitted to the committee.

RAILROAD HAZMAT

Interest in railroad cargoes through Maine piqued in early 2013, when the state became top exporter of crude oil by rail. Maine, the country’s easternmost border state, was a key transit point between the oil fields of western North America and the 300,000-barrel-per-day Irving oil refinery in neighboring Saint John, New Brunswick, one of New England’s largest suppliers of gasoline.

After the Lac-Megantic accident, environmentalists began protesting the cargoes, blocking railroad tracks and calling for a ban on its transport.

Around the same time, documents uncovered by the Maine Center For Public Interest Reporting investigation showed the railroad industry began lobbying to keep data on its cargoes secret from the Maine public.

Former Rep. Mike Shaw, D-Standish, the legislator who sponsored the bill and a railroad conductor by trade, had initially argued the legislation was needed to ensure railroads provided emergency officials with details about hazardous material shipments through Maine.

But the 80-word bill that emerged last year did nothing to make railroads provide information to local first responders. Instead, it only forced the state to keep those details secret from the public when railroads volunteered the data.

The legislation, which created the 460th exception to Maine’s Freedom of Access Act, also contradicted the findings of federal regulators. A year earlier, they had determined that information about oil train shipments was “neither security-sensitive nor commercially-sensitive,” according to a notice published in the Federal Register.

The bill nonetheless became law in June 2015 over a sharply worded veto from Gov. Paul LePage.

When presented with these findings in an interview in January, former Rep. Shaw, who resigned from the legislature in August for personal reasons, said he was willing to encourage lawmakers to amend the bill to allow officials to disclose volumes of crude oil moving through Maine.

“Keeping them confidential was really never my intention,” said Shaw.

Dave Sherwood is a contributing writer to the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, a nonpartisan, non-profit news service based in Augusta.

ExxonMobil, Flooding, Oil Industry, Oil refineries, Pipeline infrastructure

Exxon, other refineries affected as Louisiana waters rise

Repost from Bloomberg News
[Editor: You can count on the oil industry to prevaricate. The Baton Rouge Advocate reports that ExxonMobil released a statement disputing this Bloomberg report. “‘Contrary to some reports, the ExxonMobil Baton Rouge Complex is operating. It is our practice not to comment on specific unit operations at our facilities,’ the company said.”  – RS]

Exxon Said to Slow Louisiana Refinery as People Escape Flood

By Barbara J Powell & Brian K Sullivan, August 17, 2016 6:13 AM PDT, Updated 4:14 PM PDT

• Fourth-largest U.S. refinery affected as waters rise
• Louisiana is home to about 18% of U.S. refining capacity

Exxon Mobil Corp. curbed operations at the fourth-largest U.S. refinery as record flooding in Louisiana shut roadways, sent tens of thousands fleeing from their homes and threatened the state’s oil infrastructure.

The Baton Rouge refinery along the Mississippi shut four production units and idled others when the flooding threatened an offsite liquefied petroleum gas storage facility and pumping station, a person familiar with operations said early Wednesday. The refinery can process 502,500 barrels of crude a day into gasoline, diesel and other fuels.

At least 11 people have died, 30,000 people rescued and 40,000 homes have been damaged as almost 2 feet (61 centimeters) of rain fell in parts of southern Louisiana, the Associated Press reported Wednesday. Flood warnings extended across much of the southern portions of the state with many bayous and rivers still at dangerous levels. Louisiana is home to about 18 percent of U.S. refining capacity, according to Energy Information Administration data.

Pipelines, Terminals

Most in danger from direct disruption from flooding is the support infrastructure consisting of pipelines, terminals, salt caverns and above-ground pumping stations, said Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates in Houston.

“Those that supply support services to refineries could be in danger of shutting down, and that could impact refineries’ operations,” Lipow said.

Todd Spitler, an Exxon spokesman, said the refinery is operating. The company doesn’t comment on specific unit operations and has continued to meet contractual commitments, he said

Through Tuesday, Baton Rouge had received 22.11 inches of rain since the start of August, more than 19 inches above normal, according to the National Weather Service. New Orleans got 7.46 inches, or 4.35 above normal; Lake Charles had 11.22 inches, or 8.69 above normal; and Lafayette logged 23.19, or 20.81 higher than the 30-year average.

Governor John Bel Edwards declared an emergency on Friday. Residents in 20 parishes are eligible for federal assistance and in two days 39,000 people have registered, the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness said.

Motiva Convent

Motiva Enterprises LLC said in an online message to employees Wednesday afternoon that it will staff its Convent refinery, about 38 miles southeast of Baton Rouge, with only essential personnel through at least Sunday. The company had previously said the restriction would last until Wednesday.

Angela Goodwin, a Motiva spokeswoman, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. She said Tuesday that operations at Motiva’s Convent and its Norco refinery, about 38 miles to the south, are stable.

Gulf Coast fuel prices climbed early Wednesday on the prospect of refinery outages. Ultra-low sulfur diesel strengthened 1 cent to 2.75 cents below New York Mercantile Exchange futures, the narrowest discount since November 2014, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Conventional gasoline gained 1.88 cents to trade near parity with futures for the first time in four days.