Tag Archives: Minnesota

Rail officials: older tank cars have 1 in 4 chance of leaking if they derail

Repost from The Star Tribune – Business, Minneapolis, MN

Failure rates raising new fears over use of aging oil tankers

 Article by: JIM SPENCER , Star Tribune   |  April 22, 2014

Rail industry estimated their chance of leaking in derailments at 1 in 4.

A BNSF Railway train hauled crude oil near Wolf Point, Mont, in November. A National Transportation Safety Board forum on Tuesday looked at the safety in transporting crude oil and ethanol. One focus was the use of older tank cars, especially as oil train traffic increases.  Photo: Associated Press file.

WASHINGTON – Tens of thousands of older tanker cars used to haul North Dakota crude oil and Midwestern ethanol run a one-in-four risk of leaking if they derail, railroad officials told the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Tuesday.

The failure rate, estimated by the Rail Supply Institute and the American Association of Railroads, illustrates a growing concern for safety that has accompanied skyrocketing shipments of crude oil across the country.

Crude oil shipments originating in the United States have grown from about 6,000 carloads in 2005 to roughly 400,000 in 2013 as the United States has tapped domestic petroleum sources. At the same time, the government has yet to issue new standards for safer tanker construction.

About six North Dakota oil trains per day travel across Minnesota and through the Twin Cities, many of them 100 cars long. Each tank car holds 25,000 to 30,000 gallons of crude oil. Ethanol trains, which pose a similar hazard, move on Union Pacific tracks through the state.

But recent fiery crashes have convinced some policymakers that the threat of derailments like the one that happened in December in North Dakota put the public at unacceptable risk.

“A spate of recent accidents in the United States and Canada [demonstrate] that far too often, safety has been compromised,” NTSB chairwoman Deborah Hersman said.

While the rail industry says it moves 99.9 percent of its crude oil shipments incident-free, industry data show that 46,400 rail cars have been damaged in 29,000 accidents since 1970.

The older, general-use tanker cars hauling oil and ethanol meet current government safety standards, but government videos on the first day of a two-day forum about safety in crude oil and ethanol transport showed an older car rupturing during a puncture test, spraying its contents over the test site.

“Taking [older cars] out of the fleet reduces risk,” Robert Fronczak of the Association of American Railroads told the board.

But, he said, eliminating them by attrition alone could take 40 to 50 years.

Setting new standards

The sturdier tank cars being built now are half as likely as the older model to spill contents in a derailment, the rail industry estimates. But car construction standards being discussed by the government could lower the chances of a derailment leak to less than one in 20.

However, the rail supply industry has “to have regulatory certainty” before it commits to major new tanker production and retrofitting of old cars, William Finn of the Railway Supply Institute told the board.

Lee Johnson, representing the American Petroleum Institute, questioned the spill data attributed to older, so-called “legacy cars.” He called the numbers “preliminary.”

Johnson said the oil industry needs to keep shipping oil in the older cars “to move increasing production.” There are not enough of the newer, sturdier tanker cars available to meet oil producers’ demands, especially in North Dakota’s Bakken field, which Johnson said will soon be producing 2 million barrels of oil per day.

Roughly 23,000 older “legacy cars” now carry crude oil, and 29,000 more carry ethanol. The United States may soon have even more crude oil moving in the more vulnerable rail cars because of a surcharge Canada now places on their use. That means railroads may divert newer, sturdier cars to haul oil to Canada.   Retrofitting older legacy cars to make them more leakproof will take years, if not decades, several participants said.

“We don’t want to disrupt the country’s need for the fuel these cars are hauling,” Finn said.

Why the details matter

Meanwhile, a better car design remains the subject of debate.

Greg Saxton, chief engineer of the Greenbrier Cos., one of the country’s four major train car builders, believes in greater tanker wall thickness. “Engineers deal with uncertainty by adding some margin of safety,” he explained to the board.

Others argue that thicker walls add weight and reduce storage space without improving safety.

Wall thickness is probably the biggest sticking point in the tanker safety discussion. The Railway Supply Institute wants a standard width of seven-sixteenths of an inch. The Association of American Railroads wants nine-sixteenths of an inch.

“Crude oil contains a significant amount of dissolved gas,” the railroad association’s Fronczak said. A nine-sixteenth-inch wall will contain the vapor pressure that can build inside a crude oil tanker.

Videos shown Tuesday explained why such minutiae might matter. In one, a train car with a thicker wall withstood the whack of a giant prod traveling 14.7 miles per hour, while a car built to current DOT 111 standards ruptured in a 14 miles-per-hour collision.

Other issues include reinforcing the ends of tanker cars where they are most likely to be struck in a derailment, installing pressure-relief valves on tankers to keep crude oil from exploding in the event of a derailment and applying additional thermal protection to cut the risk of fires.

The NTSB’s Hersman asked Johnson how long he felt the older, more vulnerable cars would be needed to haul crude oil.

When Johnson couldn’t provide a specific time frame, Hersman replied: “You’re not making me feel very optimistic.”

NY Times: More shipments, new accidents and calls for safety

Repost from The New York Times, Business Day [Editor – this NYT article was a detail sheet linked to the major article, “Despite Rise in Spills, Hazardous Cargo Rides Rails in Secret“.  I am posting here because it is a serious contribution to our understanding of the huge increase in rail disasters in 2013-14.  – RS]

More Shipments, New Accidents and Calls for Safety

    A sharp increase in rail shipments of oil over the past decade has been accompanied by accidents and derailments that have renewed the debate about regulating transportation of hazardous materials. The shipments are regulated by federal authorities; state and local officials have little say. Despite warnings of safety risks, measures to restrict or ban such transportation have been defeated.                      Related Article
More Shipments, New Accidents and Calls for Safety
More Shipments, New Accidents and Calls for Safety

Farmers: Oil trains may delay fertilizer shipments

Repost from Ag Week

Oil traffic could delay US fertilizer shipments, farmers warn

Increasing use of railroads to ship crude oil could disrupt fertilizer cargo this spring as Midwest farmers prepare for planting, U.S. agriculture leaders warn, even as one railroad said on Monday it will take steps to ensure timely deliveries.
By: Reuters, April 15, 2014

WASHINGTON — Increasing use of railroads to ship crude oil could disrupt fertilizer cargo this spring as Midwest farmers prepare for planting, U.S. agriculture leaders warn, even as one railroad said on Monday it will take steps to ensure timely deliveries.

The planting season is nearly at hand in states such as the Dakotas and Minnesota, where soybean, wheat and corn growers will lay millions of tons of fertilizers like nitrogen and potash that mostly arrive by train.

Those supplies are not stockpiled near the fields and the farmers rely instead on steady deliveries by rail.“

Since we don’t store fertilizer, the next very few weeks are incredibly important for South Dakota farmers,” said state Agriculture Secretary Lucas Lentsch.

But fertilizer cargo is being waylaid as railroads are clogged by trains carrying crude and other freight and that could ultimately jeopardize the fall crop, farmers have warned lawmakers and other officials.

“If rails are too congested for fertilizer in the weeks ahead, the problem will solve itself because there won’t be anything to harvest in the fall,” said Dave Andresen of Full Circle Ag, a farm services company in South Dakota.

BNSF Railway Co. said on Monday it had assigned more locomotives and train crews to expedite fertilizer deliveries so nutrients can arrive at delivery points on time.

“We understand the shortness of the season and the necessity of timely delivery,” the rail operator said in a notice to farm customers.

CHS Inc., a top farm supplier in the Upper Midwest, expects to help meet near-term demand for nutrients but is concerned supplies could dwindle a little later in the growing season.

“In the early weeks of planting, farmers need a recharge and the fertilizer sheds need to be stocked up before then,” said Jeff Greseth, the company’s head of crop nutrition.

Supply lines have been snarled in part by clearing grain bins of the remainder of last year’s crop and recovering from harsh winter weather.

Barges ferrying dry fertilizer on the Mississippi River and into Minnesota have found some waterways frozen over for longer than normal, Greseth said.

“The ice has some deliveries running a week, 10 days late,” he said, but an increase in oil-by-rail traffic has also weighed on the train network.

Rail shipments of crude oil have been on the rise in North Dakota’s Bakken energy patch, where production is nearing 1 million barrels per day, and roughly 72 percent of that fuel moves on the tracks.

Last week, farmers beseeched federal officials to make sure rail operators such as BNSF and Canadian Pacific Railway Co were giving them enough access to the tracks.

The Surface Transportation Board, a regulatory agency that arbitrates rail disputes, has heard from farmers across the upper Midwest that a shortage of rail cars and delivery delays were endangering their livelihoods.

BNSF executives have said service will improve in the years ahead along with investment and an expected uptick in farm, crude oil and other commodity shipments.