Repost from Iowa Public Radio [Editor: For the most part, Canadian Pacific Railway spokesperson Andy Cummings is incredibly evasive, offering only general and unresponsive answers to the radio reporter interviewing him. This is a 21-minute investigative report, well worth listening beyond the first interview with Mr. Cummings. – R]
Derailment in Dubuque–A Reminder of the Hazards of Transporting Oil by Rail
By Emily Woodbury & Ben Kieffer, Feb. 13, 2015
DOT-111s make up about 70 percent of the U.S. tank car fleet | Bengt 1955 / flickr
With at least one million gallons of crude oil and ethanol passing through Iowa on a single freight train, derailments like the one last week a few miles from Dubuque are a major concern.
“As ethanol dilutes into the water, it’s kind of that process that depletes the oxygen from the water,” says Kevin Baskins, spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. “That’s something we’re going to continue to monitor in the near future.”
Baskins says that the cleanup is going well so far, and they are in the process of sparging air, a process that involves evaporating the ethanol into the air rather that letting it dissolve into the water.
Erin Jordan, reporter with The Gazette and KCRG-TV9, says that derailments with DOT-111s can be especially problematic, as they are vulnerable to puncture in a derailment. DOT-111s are a type of train car commonly used to transport crude oil and ethanol, as well as other hazardous materials.
“A Johnson County commodity study showed, in addition to ethanol, there was also battery acid, anhydrous ammonia, pesticides, paint […] and so you can imagine there would be an environmental effect to those,” she says.
Right now, nine Iowa counties have extra large shipments of crude oil traveling through. While area residents are not notified of what materials are being hauled through their communities, Canadian Pacific Railway’s spokesperson Andy Cummings says they will answer specific questions from emergency responders.
“They can contact the railroad, and we will make that information available to them,” says Andy Cummings. “For security reasons, we do not share details of our dangerous goods movements publicly.”
Canadian Pacific Railway and BNSF Railway Co. also report large shipments of Bakken crude oil to Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
“There has to be more with respect to openness and disclosure of the chemicals that are being transported,” says Baskins. “When a spill happens, it’s immediate that you have to alert the public, you have to have a plan in place to respond, and you can’t do that if you’re trying to figure out what’s in the chemical that actually spilled.”
On this River to River segment, Ben Kieffer talks with Kevin Baskins and Erin Jordan, as well as David Cwiertny, associate faculty research engineer for the IIHR—Hydroscience & Engineering at the University of Iowa, and Andy Cummings, spokesperson for Canadian Pacific Railway.
Berkshire’s BNSF to Add Surcharge on Older Oil Tank Cars
By Thomas Black, Dan Murtaugh and Lynn Doan, Oct 24, 2014
BNSF Railway Co. plans to apply a $1,000 surcharge for each older tank car that hauls oil, as the railroad owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. encourages shippers to scrap the puncture-prone cars.
The charge, which will take effect Jan. 1, will add about $1.50 a barrel to the cost of shipping oil across the country. It’s the first one announced by a major U.S. railroad for older cars known as DOT-111s, and won’t apply to cars called CPC-1232s that are built to higher standards adopted in October 2011, according to a BNSF notice.
The Obama administration in July proposed phasing out thousands of the older tank cars within two years and lowering speed limits as part of new rules to reduce the risk of hauling crude by rail. The plan followed a series of fiery accidents, including the derailment and explosion of a crude train last year that killed 47 people in the Canadian town of Lac Mégantic.
The extraction of oil from shale fields with limited pipelines, such as in North Dakota’s Bakken, caused U.S. rail carloads of crude to surge to 415,000 last year from 9,500 in 2008, according to the Transportation Department.
Mike Trevino, a spokesman for BNSF, confirmed the surcharge notice.
Tank cars typically hold about 700 barrels of oil, which means the surcharge would boost the cost of shipping in older cars by $1.50 a barrel. The cost to ship crude by train to East Coast refineries from North Dakota is about $9 to $10 a barrel, San Antonio-based Tesoro Corp. said in a September presentation.
BNSF, which operates tracks that connect into the Bakken and other shale oil fields, said in February it plans to order 5,000 new crude tank cars with safety standards higher than the CPC-1232s in an effort to push shippers toward safer cars.
‘Bomb trains’: A crude awakening for Richmond, Calif.
Local activists try to halt the shipment of explosive Bakken crude oil through their neighborhoods
October 24, 2014, by Audrea Lim@das_audsterSmoke rises from railway cars carrying crude oil after derailing in downtown Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in 2013. Paul Chiasson / The Canadian Press / AP
RICHMOND, Calif. — The streets are quiet in Lipo Chanthanasak’s neighborhood on the outer edge of this city’s downtown core. Each of the small houses is painted a variation of beige and separated from the road by a neatly kept lawn, as if to highlight the scene’s utter normalcy. But half a mile west are the BNSF Railway tracks and the Kinder Morgan rail facility, which quietly began receiving trains of Bakken crude last year.
Chanthanasak, who moved to Richmond from Laos 24 years ago, lives within the potential blast zone should an oil train derail, according to an online map created by the environmental-advocacy group ForestEthics. The 70-year-old retiree says he only learned that crude was being transported through his community because of his involvement with the nonprofit Asian Pacific Environmental Network, or APEN. Many of his neighbors, he says, are unaware.
Since July 2013, when a train carrying Bakken crude from North Dakota derailed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing at least 42 people and flattening the town, major crude-by-rail accidents have occurred in Alabama, North Dakota, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Colorado. ForestEthics says that 25 million Americans live within an oil-train-evacuation zone. An elementary school, a public-housing project and an affluent, elderly community fall within Richmond’s zone, according to the advocacy group.
Bakken crude has been arriving since last year at the Richmond, California, train depot, pictured here. Google
The transport of crude by rail is not a new phenomenon, but it has increased significantly over the past few years. In the first half of this year, 229,798 carloads of crude were transported by rail, up from 9,500 carloads in all of 2008.The increase is largely connected to the development of the Bakken shale, oil-rich rock formation that lies beneath parts of the northern United States and Canada.
Compared with traditional forms of crude oil, Bakken crude has been shown to be much more volatile and more likely to explode in the event of derailment. Hence the rail cars’ nickname among activists: “bomb trains.” But apart from a code on the side of the cars, nothing about their appearance indicates their origins. Smooth and cylindrical, the black cars would be adorable, if only their contents weren’t so dangerous. Richmond’s Kinder Morgan facility, a rail yard containing very little except several tracks, is just as unassuming. The trains (100 to 120 carshitched together, all carrying the same product) arrive here, where they are lined up in several rows, each waiting for their content to be pumped into tanker trucks (three tankers are required to hold the contents of a single railcar). The tankers are then thought to travel another 25 miles northeast to a Tesoro Corporation refinery in Martinez.
Previously, the Kinder Morgan facility receiving ethanol by rail. But in September 2013, after securing the necessary air-quality permit granted by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (without the knowledge of its board), the facility quietly switched over to handling crude. By the time the community found out, in March 2014, through an investigative story by the local CBS station, KPIX, it was already too late. The lawsuit that the nonprofit group Earthjustice filed (on behalf of APEN and others) to halt operations at the terminal was dismissed by the Superior Court of San Francisco in September, because it had been filed after the 180-day deadline.
“It’s a catch-22,” says Andres Soto, an organizer for Communities for a Better Environment, one of the co-plaintiffs in the suit. “How can you even comment unless you knew that something had been done? We would’ve had to be going through public records on a regular basis to discover when they’re making these kinds of decisions.”
Richmond’s case is not unique: In June, a NuStar terminal in Vancouver, Washington, also received an air-quality permit to begin storing crude without public notification. Community resistance has, however, encouraged the Vancouver City Council to adopt an emergency six-month moratorium on new or expanded crude-by-rail facilities.
“It’s very rarely been the case that local representatives or city councils have questioned these things without being encouraged to by local citizens or by being forced to by local action groups,” said Lorne Stockman, research director at Oil Change International and author of two recent reports on the rise of crude-by-rail in North America. “The only way [the projects] have been challenged are because vigilant citizens have questioned them.”
The secrecy that has characterized the projects has been aided by the fact that, in many cases, their introduction requires very little new construction — none at all in the case of Kinder Morgan. That makes the projects virtually invisible. This is also why crude by rail has been economically viable, despite being slightly more costly than transport via pipelines. In addition, pipeline projects normally require 20- to 30-year contracts to recoup their capital investments. Therefore, because the Bakken oil boom is not expected to last, constructing new pipelines to service it often doesn’t make economic sense. Meanwhile, the Bakken region is already connected to the West Coast by existing rail infrastructure. With crude prices higher in the West Coast than elsewhere in the country, and a growing Asian market for North American crude, the transportation of crude by rail to the West Coast is likely to increase unless community resistance proves successful.
New reports on backlogs bring renewed criticism of railroads
By: Tom Meersman and Jim Spencer, October 24, 2014
Critics say they prove oil favoritism; railroads say numbers are misleading.
Grain elevators seen from a passing train. With continued delays and backlogs for grain shipments, railroads have been accused of playing favorites. Photo: GLEN STUBBE , Star Tribune
Farming groups and other businesses blasted railroads for poor service and favoritism Thursday after seeing new reports about backlogs and waiting times for rail cars.
Rail critics say new data that the federal Surface Transportation Board has begun collecting suggests that the railroads are giving preference to oil shipments, creating long delays for other freight.
A table from BNSF Railway Co., the region’s dominant railway for grain shipments, reported 747 loaded grain cars that had not moved in more than five days during the week of Oct. 12-18, and only six crude oil cars that had delays of that length.
Gary Wertish, vice president of the Minnesota Farmers Union, said the numbers confirm what many farmers and grain elevators have witnessed all year: oil trains on the move constantly, and grain trains few and far between.
“This is the source of our complaints all along,” Wertish said. “Obviously they’re playing favorites with crude oil.”
The regulators early this month ordered the railroads to assemble and submit weekly reports about their performance, following months of complaints from grain shippers, coal suppliers and utilities, ethanol dealers, taconite processors, and Amtrak executives.
The businesses have claimed that delays in rail service over the past year have cost them and their customers hundreds of millions of dollars in lost time, late supplies and higher prices.
In submitting the first reports, railroads cautioned against drawing quick conclusions from the data.
Canadian Pacific Railway’s president and chief operating officer, Keith Creel, urged regulators in a letter “to step back and consult with all the stakeholders” before continuing the process.
The federal order “imposes a significant regulatory burden without articulating how providing this information will improve the overall rail supply chain in the United States,” Creel wrote. Canadian Pacific serves Minnesota, North Dakota and other northern states.
Sens. Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota have followed the issue closely, and all three issued statements Thursday. Klobuchar said the railroad data are needed to understand the problems and “guide decisions” that will reduce delays.
“More transparency in rail operations hardly seems like a tough burden to bear considering what rail shippers in Minnesota are going through,” Franken said.
Canadian Pacific and other railroads filed the reports with the Surface Transportation Board, which regulates the industry. After months of complaints and several hearings, the Board issued an order on Oct. 8 for large railroads to report performance details each week.
The reports cover such things as train speeds, dwell times at terminals, weekly cars on line by car type, weekly total number of loaded and empty cars that have not moved in more than 5 days, coal unit train loadings, grain cars by state and cargo, and number of days late for all outstanding grain car orders.
Bob Zelenka, executive director of the Minnesota Grain and Feed Association, said the report is “unfortunate news” because BNSF pledged weeks ago that it would catch up with its backlogs before harvest, but has not done so.
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“It looks like it’s business as usual,” Zelenka said. “The numbers seem to indicate that for whatever reason, the railroads have an easier time moving oil on this congested system than anything else, and I wonder why.”
A study last July estimated that transportation problems between March and May cost Minnesota corn, soybean and wheat farmers more than $100 million in increased freight rates, higher storage costs, lost sales and penalties for products not delivered on time.
Several utilities have also had trouble with delayed and irregular coal deliveries and some have dialed back their power plants and taken other steps to conserve coal stockpiles.
Xcel Energy’s director of fuel supply operations, Craig Romer, said Xcel’s power plants served by BNSF are far behind in the amount of coal they store on site. “Our inventories are in terrible shape,” he said, referring to Xcel’s large Sherco plant in Minnesota and four other coal-burning plants in Colorado and Texas.
“In July, August and September, the railroad actually performed worse than it did in the polar vortex in the middle of the winter,” Romer said. The winter rail problems were related to weather, he said, and the summer disruptions were caused by BNSF track maintenance.
Romer expects regular service to resume when rail construction projects end in a few weeks. “But there’s such a backlog of volume to deliver, it will be several months before they [BNSF] actually turn this thing around,” he said.
BNSF officials have said repeatedly that the company does not give preference to oil shipments over other commodities, and that the railroad is moving more agricultural products than ever before in the region. In a statement late Thursday, the company said that fewer oil cars have delays because oil is moved mainly in unit trains built for speed and efficiency and headed for a single destination.
About half of BNSF’s 27,000 rail cars are also used for 110-car unit trains, the statement said, but the other half are on trains that are broken up as they move across the country and put in rail yards where they are mixed with other cars with different cargoes and sent to various destinations.
“With such a large number of single cars in ag service, the number of cars held [waiting] will always be higher than a commodity traveling almost exclusively in unit trains,” the company said.
In its report, BNSF also noted that if a rail car is held “for more than 48 hours or even 120 hours, it does not necessarily mean that the car will not be delivered in a timely manner or even within the initial service plan.”
Because the weekly reporting system is new and needs to be refined, the company said, “we caution against drawing firm conclusions based upon the absolute values reported in BNSF’s report.”
Staff writer David Shaffer contributed to this report.
“As ethanol dilutes into the water, it’s kind of that process that depletes the oxygen from the water,” says Kevin Baskins, spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. “That’s something we’re going to continue to monitor in the near future.”
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