Repost from The Vallejo Times-Herald [Editor: … as if risks of derailment and explosion weren’t enough to worry about… – RS]
Legislation to enhance crude-by-rail safety passes House
Times-Herald staff report | 06/05/2014
Following an increase in crude oil by rail to the Bay Area, Rep. Mike Thompson has authored legislation aimed at making it safer to transport the highly flammable cargo.
The legislation, which would require an assessment of domestic refinery and rail-related infrastructure, passed the House of Representatives last week by a bipartisan vote of 345 to 59.
It’s currently in the Senate.
“Public safety is the number one priority when we’re transporting and holding crude oil and other cargo through and in our communities,” Thompson said Thursday. “This legislation will let us know if threats exist and how we can fix them.”
Thompson’s district includes three refineries, including the Valero Benicia Refinery, which is seeking approval of a major crude-by-rail terminal. The project’s environmental impact report is due out next week.
Bakken crude from North Dakota, regarded as more flammable than other crudes, is part of the mix of increased crude-by-rail shipments to California. The legislation would require the Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis to conduct an intelligence assessment of the safety of refinery and crude-by-rail infrastructure. After the assessment is conducted, safety recommendations would be submitted to the House and Senate intelligence committees.
Lawsuit Filed – Chevron Refinery Permit to Pollute Exposed
Today Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) filed suit against the Bay Area Air Quality Management District for the District’s illegal permitting of the Chevron (“Modernization”) Expansion Project. CBE had previously requested the District to revoke the permit that allowed Chevron to build a Richmond refinery expansion that could increase air pollution from one of the state’s biggest industrial climate polluters without required emission prevention and environmental reviews.
“Letting oil refineries expand without requiring—or even looking for—measures to prevent the resultant air pollution threatens our health” said CBE Attorney Roger Lin.
CBE discovered that the Air District staff granted Chevron “Authority to Construct” the project without an Environmental Impact Report (EIR), public review or analysis of whether the emissions from the project will even meet EPA’s national standards for the protection of public health and welfare from harmful levels of pollutants. Chevron sought the approval despite court orders in 2009 and 2010 that invalidated its permits for a Richmond refinery project with many of the same elements. The courts found its EIR for that project failed to disclose impacts of refining lower quality oil and improperly deferred greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation.
Chevron’s new project would switch to lower quality oil, and—if unmitigated—could increase refinery GHG emissions by 725,000–890,000 tonnes/year, increase toxic emissions, and worsen a cause of Chevron’s disastrous 2012 fire, according to a revised draft City of Richmond EIR that relies largely on the Air District to mitigate project air impacts.
“First, we discovered the permit to allow the ticking time bomb of crude-by-rail with no public disclosure or environmental review. Then we discovered a permit that was stopped in the courts for a project that could be dirty, dangerous, and deadly. The Air District needs to respond with answers and act immediately to stop putting communities at risk,” demanded Vivian Yi Huang, Campaign & Organizing Director of Asian Pacific Environmental Network.
“Issuing air district permits prematurely before CEQA review of the project has been completed makes no sense, especially to a corporation that has demonstrated criminal negligence leading up to the August 2012 explosion and fire. Experience has shown that monitoring alone is less effective than controlling the source of emissions from the outset. We expect BAAQMD to do a better job of protecting the health and well-being of our community” said Marilyn Langlois of the Richmond Progressive Alliance.
“It’s high time the Air Board members stand up to their staff’s errors in judgment in rubber stamping Chevron’s illegal permit and revoke it immediately,” stated Denny Larson of Global Community Monitor, a resident of Richmond. Larson added: “The people of Richmond have suffered enough at the hands of Chevron and the Air District staff—it’s time for a change!”
“The health impacts of this project cannot be understated. The project calls for substantial increases in local emissions, including many chemicals that are known carcinogens. This deeply concerns me as a nurse and as a community member. The public deserves full disclosure and an environmental review,” said Deborah Burger, RN, Co-President of the California Nurses Association.
In 2011, EPA delegated permitting authority to maintain national air quality standards to the Air District. By repeatedly renewing Chevron’s permit since 2010, versus waiting for the revised and adequate EIR, and then asking Chevron to reapply for its permit under current, more protective requirements, the Air District dodged applying that delegated authority to the Project. This ignores the new review’s findings of massive potential GHG and toxic particulate matter emission increases from the project that would otherwise trigger best available technology requirements to instead reduce emissions. Those protections are basic requirements of both CEQA and clean air laws–and desperately needed in the already-overburdened communities on Chevron’s fence line.
The Richmond refinery has been among the state’s three largest GHG-emitting facilities in each of the five years when the Air Resources Board reported those emissions (2008–2012), emitting more GHG than any other California facility three of those years. Its 2012 crude unit fire that nearly killed 20 workers and sent some 15,000 residents to the hospital was caused by Chevron’s failure to heed its own workers’ warnings about corrosion from higher sulfur crude, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board has found. Particulate matter air pollution from its catalytic cracker has increased to more than 1,700 pounds per day, more than 1,200 lb/day above the permitted limit, as the cat-cracker runs more oil produced from the heaviest parts of the crude stream, CBE’s review of Air District records has found. All of these impacts could worsen if the project enables Chevron to refine even lower quality oil.
Should shipments of oil by rail be kept secret from the public?
Posted on June 4, 2014 | By Joel Connelly
Several CSX tanker cars carrying crude oil erupt in flames after derailing in downtown Lynchburg, Va., on April 30. It was the latest in a series of oil train accidents. Nobody was killed, but much of downtown Lynchburg was evacuated. (AP Photo/City of Lynchburg, LuAnn Hunt)
The nation’s railroads were told last week by the U.S. Department of Transportation that they must notify state emergency management officials about the volume, frequency and county-by-county routes used in cross country shipment of volatile North Dakota crude oil.
But a hitch has developed in Washington, where refineries at Anacortes and Cherry Point north of Bellingham are increasingly relying on oil by rail.
In its order, the Department of Transportation, siding with the railroads, said the information ought to be kept secret from the public.
The DOT told state emergency preparedness agencies to “treat this data as confidential, providing it only to those with a need to know and with the understanding that recipients of the data will continue to treat it as confidential.”
The BNSF and Union Pacific Railroads have sent the state drafts of confidentiality agreements that would restrict access to what the shippers call “security sensitive information.”
A DOT-111 rail tanker passes through Council Bluffs, Iowa. DOT-111 rail cars being used to ship crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken region are an “unacceptable public risk,” and even cars voluntarily upgraded by the industry may not be sufficient, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board told Congress in February. The cars were involved in derailments of oil trains in Casselton, N.D., and Lac-Megantic, Quebec, just across the U.S. border. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik, File)
On Wednesday, however, spokesman Mark Stewart of state Emergency Response Commission told the Associated Press that the railroads’ request conflicts with one of Washington pioneering open government laws.
The confidentiality agreements “require us to withhold the information in a manner that’s not consistent with the Public Records Act,” Stewart told the AP.
The US DOT order came in the wake of a series of oil train fires, most recently train cars catching fire in Lynchburg, Virginia and dumping “product” into the James River.
This follows a deadly runaway trail explosion last year that leveled the downtown of Lac-Megantic, Quebec, and killed 47 people, as well as an explosion and fire near Casselton, North Dakota.
Lawmakers, notably Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, have pressed the Transportation Department to speed implementation of new safety rules that would require phaseout of 1960′s-vintage, explosion vulnerable DOT 111 tank cars.
The Tesoro Refinery in Anacortes accepted its first trainload of oil in September of 2012. The shipments have soared, with 17 million barrels of oil coming into the state by rail in 2013. Trains carry as many as 50,000 barrels of crude oil to the Tesoro refinery.
And Tesoro wants to build a $100 million rail-to-barge terminal in the Port of Vancouver on the Columbia River. It would be the largest such terminal in the Northwest, capable of receiving 380,000 barrels of oil a day. The Vancouver City Council voted earlier this week to oppose the project.
Shell Anacortes is in the process of creating a facility that would take 100-car oil trains. The BP Refinery at Cherry Point is also receiving oil by rail.
All told, according to a Sightline Institute study, 11 refineries and ports in Washington and Oregon are either receiving oil by rail, or have projects underway to receive rail shipments of oil.
The shipments head by rail through cities in both Eastern and Western Washington.
The railroads have been highly secretive about their operations. They are regulated by the federal government under the Interstate Commerce Act, leaving cities and local governments with almost no rights to request information or limit operations.
The BNSF has promised to purchase 5,000 newer, safer tank cars, and Tesoro has pledged to phase out use of the DOT-111 cars this year.
Washington City Rejects Massive Oil Train Project, Citing ‘Unacceptable Risks’
By Emily Atkin June 4, 2014
Flanked by hundreds of concerned residents, the City Council of Vancouver in southwestern Washington State voted early Tuesday morning to formally oppose what would be the Pacific Northwest’s largest crude oil train terminal, saying the project poses “unacceptable risks” to the city’s population of 160,000.
The council’s decision came after six hours of testimony from more than 100 residents, most of them opposed to Tesoro Corp.’s plan to develop a large train terminal at the Port of Vancouver, which would receive up to 380,000 barrels of North Dakotan crude oil per day and transfer it to ships bound for West Coast refineries. That amount of oil, which would come through the city on four separate unit trains per day, is just less than half the daily amount that would be transported by the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.
“The Council’s opposition … [is] due to the unacceptable risks posed to the citizens of Vancouver by the terminal and the related transportation of Bakken crude oil through the city,” the resolution, passed 5-2, reads.
The broad, non-binding resolution opposing Tesoro’s proposal also included language that formally opposes any proposal that would result in an increase of crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken shale being hauled through Clark County. Last July, 47 people were killed in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, when a train carrying Bakken crude derailed. The U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has warned Bakken crude could be more flammable than regular oil, due to either its unique properties or because of added chemicals from the hydraulic fracturing process used to extract it.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) also recently made recommendations that crude oil trains stay far away from urban population centers, citing the increasing rate of fiery accidents involving crude oil trains.
Vancouver Mayor Tim Leavitt and Councilor Bill Turlay were the two that voted no against the proposal, with Leavitt saying he didn’t want to make a “political statement” against a single project without having all the facts.
“It’s kind of like back in the Old West, [when] Judge Roy Bean said, ‘We’re going to have a fair trial and hang the guilty bastard’,” Turlay said, according to a report in the Columbian. “Now, that’s not exactly how I want to present this.”
Turlay and Leavitt did join the other councilors in voting for a resolution that would allow the city to actually have a say in the decision-making process over Tesoro’s proposed project. That resolution allowing intervention in the decision-making process gives Vancouver officials the right to present evidence against the project and appeal any decision, which will ultimately be made by the state’s sitting governor, currently Gov. Jay Inslee.
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