Tag Archives: Crude by Rail

Our Earth Day refocus on the larger issues

By Roger Straw, Editor, The Benicia Independent, April 22, 2015

tarsands_wis-sierra-club — This Sierra Club before-and-after photo of tar sands strip mining appeared with my 6/14/13 opinion in the Benicia Herald, “Do Benicians want tar-sands oil brought here?” – Roger Straw

My initial alarm over Valero’s proposal to build a crude-by-rail offloading facility here in my hometown came almost two years ago now, when I learned of the destruction in Alberta Canada caused by the mining and processing of tar sands. It was plain to me that a decision to permit Valero Crude By Rail here, thousands of miles from those dirty bitumen mines, would position my hometown as a valued partner in the world’s most toxic oil extraction and transport operation. I joined with others here in Benicia to organize so that we would have no part in that dirty game.

For me and for many along the rails in the U.S., our focus shifted gradually – or in some cases suddenly – to public safety issues surrounding Bakken shale oil train derailments and the resultant catastrophic explosions and fireballs.

Lately, I’m thinking that even though these safety concerns will not go away with the eventual passage of a few new laws and long-delayed safety regulations, we all might want to consider renewing and strengthening our original focus.

What we decide here along the tracks and in refinery towns has EVERYTHING to do with the situation in Alberta and the Upper Midwest where tar sands bitumen and shale oil is being produced. People there, the land there, the wildlife, the air and water … these are the first and lasting victims of our thirst for cheap oil.

We hear so much about the oil boom’s contribution to “energy independence.” Well, let’s focus on REAL energy independence: leave the oil in the ground, tax carbon, invest in clean energy.

The Benicia Independent has always been concerned with climate change, the air we breathe and the water and land that sustains life. But our focus, like that of much of the media, has been primarily on the oil train derailments that have understandably shocked and frightened the public since July, 2013. As editor and publisher, I’m serving notice this Earth Day, that the Benicia Independent is taking on a renewed commitment to cover the ongoing environmental damage and the increased risks of pollution if we permit oil trains.

You will begin to see more stories about proposed carbon taxes, polar ice, the destruction of land and lives in Alberta and the Upper Midwest and more.

Note that I fully expect my work to be dominated from time to time by the NEXT BIG EXPLOSION, and the NEXT ONE…. As long as oil trains rumble through our neighborhoods, city centers, mountains and wetlands and into our refinery industrial centers, we WILL see derailments. And no matter the new federal safety rules and the efforts of the rail and oil industries, NOTHING can prevent the massive weight of a moving chain of these monstrous tank cars from coming off the tracks occasionally, accordion jackknifing, flipping and puncturing, setting off horrific explosions, and endangering human life and our natural world. It will happen, and I will cover the news.

But for every day that you DON’T see a news report with fiery skies and black billowing smoke, please understand that the not-so-silent killer strip-mines and the fracking and horizontal drilling continue, too often unreported. Far from most of us, but up close and real to the people who live there, our earth is groaning under the weight of our permitting decisions and our corporate desire for continued crude-oil profitability.

Here in Benicia, we will say NO to crude by rail. It’s a tangible way to have a small say in the welfare of our town, our state, our nation and our beautiful planet earth.

Leave the oil in the ground. Tax carbon. Invest in clean energy.

Sightline Daily

Understanding the North American Tar Sands
Jan 14, 2015 … Last year, Portland’s KBOO Community Radio profiled what is “the largest industrial project on Earth”: the North American tar sands. Typically, one hears of the “Canadian tar sands,” as if the issue is one that lives only north of the US national border and need not concern American citizens. But reporter Barbara Bernstein’s documentary, “Fighting Goliath,” revealed an alarming and very real threat…

Oil Change International

Tar Sands
Tar sands are found underneath Canada’s great boreal forest and consist of heavy crude oil trapped in a mixture of sand and clay. To extract oil from tar sands, companies must destroy fragile forest ecosystems and then use a very energy-intensive upgrading and refining process to turn that sludge into transportation fuel….

Also this recent article: Transporting Tar Sands “As Dangerous” As Shale Oil (March 2015)

Natural Resources Defense Council

Stop Dirty Fuels : Tar Sands
In Canada, the oil industry is transforming one of the world’s last remaining intact ecosystems into America’s gas tank….

Forest Ethics

Stop the US demand for Canada’s toxic Tar Sands

Canada’s tar sands is one of the largest industrial projects on the planet, and its environmental footprint is growing by the second. At a time when the world needs to transition to cleaner energy, the tar sands is the poster child of what we should not be doing. It’s time to put a healthy environment above corporate profit and the endless drive for more oil….

[More Google links on tar sands …]

Tar Sands Basics

ostseis.anl.gov/guide/tarsands/
Argonne National Laboratory
Tar sands (also referred to as oil sands) are a combination of clay,
sand, water, and bitumen, a heavy black viscous oil. Tar sands can
be mined and processed to extract the oil-rich bitumen, which is
then refined into oil.

Oil sands – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands
Oil sand is either loose sand or partially consolidated sandstone
containing a naturally occurring mixture of sand, clay, and water,
saturated with a dense and extremely viscous form of petroleum
technically referred to as bitumen (or colloquially tar due to its
similar appearance, odour, and colour).‎

Stop Dirty Fuels: Tar Sands

www.nrdc.org/…/dirtyfuels_tar.asp

Extracting tar sands, and turning bitumen into crude oil, uses vast amounts of energy and water, and causes significant air and water pollution, and three times …

What are the Tar Sands? | Rainforest Action Network

www.ran.org/what-are-tar–sands
Rainforest Action Network
The Keystone XL pipeline is a disastrous project of tar sands oil
companies that will do serious damage to our country and
climate. If built, the spill prone …

Canada’s oil sands: The steam from below | The Economist

www.economist.com/…/21615488-new-technologies-are-…
The Economist
Sep 6, 2014 – ONE of the bleakest scenes of man-made
destruction is the strip mining of oil sands in the forests of
Alberta, Canada. The sand is permeated …

Tar sands – Friends of the Earth

www.foe.org/projects/climate-and-energy/tar–sands

Tar sands are found underneath Canada’s great boreal forest and consist of heavy crude oil trapped in a mixture of sand and clay. To extract oil from tar sands, …

Canada’s tar sands: Muck and brass | The Economist

www.economist.com/node/17959688‎ – The Economist

But golf courses and suburban housing make the place liveable, and some locals have grown attached to Alberta’s tar sands and Fort McMurray, the town at the centre of them. “I’d like …

Unconventional Crude – The New Yorker

www.newyorker.com/magazine/…/unconventional-crud…‎ – The New Yorker

The tar sands begin near the border of Saskatchewan, around the latitude of Edmonton, and extend, in three major deposits, north and west almost to British Columbia. All in all, they …

How Much Will Tar Sands Oil Add to Global Warming?

www.scientificamerican.com/…/tar–sands-and-keyston…‎ – Scientific American

The Opposite of Mining: Tar Sands Steam Extraction Lessens Footprint, but Environmental Costs Remain · Oil Sands Raise Levels of Cancer-Causing Compounds in Regional Waters.

What are Oil Sands? – Canadian Association of Petroleum …

www.capp.ca/…oil…/oil–sa…

Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers

Oil sands are a mixture of sand, water, clay and bitumen. They are found in several locations around the globe including Venezuela, USA, Russia and Canada.

No Tar Sands | UK Tar Sands Network | What are tar sands?

www.no-tar–sands.org/what-are-the-tar–sands/

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Derailment, DOT-111, Emergency Readiness & Response, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.)

New York Times op ed video: A Danger on Rails

April 21, 2015 Roger Straw

Repost from The New York Times
[Editor: This is another good locally-based video, this time focusing on crude-by-rail in the Albany NY region. We have seen similar professional quality videos featuring the Pacific Northwest (by Columbia Riverkeeper and VICE News) and an Inside Climate News / Weather Films documentary, “Boom” that is broad in scope, focusing in on a bridge in Alabama. We need someone to create a prime time video documenting the looming threat of increasing oil trains here in our beautiful California, focusing not only on safety concerns, but also on the part our corporate decisions will play – or won’t play – in the desolation of land in Alberta Canada and the Upper Midwest and the massive release of toxic fossil fuel chemicals that contribute to climate change. – RS]

‘A Danger on Rails’

This short documentary warns about the dangers posed by trains that transport explosive oil across North America.

Op-Docs, by Jon Bowermaster, April 21, 2015

In recent years, small towns across the United States have begun hosting an increasingly common phenomenon: long trains, made up of 100-plus black cylindrical cars, rolling slowly past our hospitals, schools and homes.

Few who see them know what they carry: highly flammable crude oil from the shale fields around North Dakota.

I live in the Hudson Valley and see these trains daily; Albany is a major hub, and trains traveling south down the Hudson River toward mid-Atlantic refineries hug its shores. Every day on the East Coast, as many as 400,000 barrels of this explosive mixture travel through our backyards over shaky bridges, highways and overpasses.

As this Op-Doc video shows, there are reasons to be very concerned about this increased train traffic, which is directly related to the boom in oil and gas drilling in the Midwest. These trains can be very dangerous, prompting some to call them “bomb trains.” There have already been horrific railway accidents in North America caused when these trains go off the tracks, some of them fatal.

No one wants the responsibility, or expense, of improving the safety of the cars, fuel, tracks or related infrastructure that would reduce the threat. While new regulations are expected in May from the United States Department of Transportation, environmentalists are not hopeful for much change — given the powerful lobbying efforts of the oil and rail industries.

Already this year there have been four serious derailments, resulting in spills, explosions and fires. Safety and Homeland Security officials have mentioned these “rolling bombs” as potential terrorist weapons. And the Department of Transportation has estimated that at this rate there will be 15 major accidents in the United States this year alone. I hope we will do our best to prevent them.

Jon Bowermaster’s most recent documentaries include “Antarctica 3D, On the Edge” and “Dear Governor Cuomo: New Yorkers Against Fracking in One Voice.’’ He is a 30-year resident of the Hudson Valley.

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Tank car design, Tar sands crude, Valero Benicia Refinery, Valero Crude By Rail

Solano County study addresses rail plans, including crude-by-rail

April 18, 2015 Roger Straw

Repost from The Fairfield Daily Republic
[Editor: Download the 152-page Update from the STA website. Although this article doesn’t mention it, significant attention is paid to crude by rail in the Update: see p. 8 on the Benicia-Martinez Railroad Bridge, p. 15 on the Valero Refinery, pp. 27-29 on Future Demand (including crude-by-rail), pp. 91-93 on Potential Projects, and See also p. 130 on Positive Train Control and a reference on p. 131 to a possible “Benicia Narrows high-level rail crossing bypassing downtown Benicia.” (Note PDF page numbering is 4 more than doc page numbers) – RS]

Solano Rail Facilities Plan Update available for review

By Kevin W. Green, 4/18/15

SUISUN CITY — A draft Solano Rail Facilities Plan Update has been released for public review.

The governing board of the Solano Transportation Authority released the study this week for a 30-day period public comment.

The board last year approved developing an update to the rail plan, which was originally adopted in 1995. The board wanted to update priorities for rail stations and future service and rail freight priorities, according to a staff report.

In addition to focusing on passenger rail facilities along the main Union Pacific rail lines, it also addresses passenger rail potential in the Vallejo area and freight rail throughout Solano County, staff said in the report.

The four daily long-distance Amtrak services that connect the Bay Area with destinations to the north, south and east do not serve Solano communities directly, according to the study. As one of the largest service areas by population on those routes without a station stop, Solano should consider advocating a stop at the Suisun City or Fairfield-Vacaville stations, the study said.

Passenger travel from the Suisun City station on the Capitol Corridor, meanwhile, is about evenly split – with passengers heading east nearly equal to those going west, consultant David McCrossan said in presenting the plan update to the Solano Transportation Authority’s board.

The study includes anticipated growth in passenger rail service. Ridership growth of 10 percent to 20 percent is expected in the next 10 years, it said.

The opening of the new Fairfield-Vacaville station will likely add up to 15 percent to the total ridership within the county, the study indicated. Although the new station may initially share some of the catchment of the current Suisun City station, growing mixed-use development in the immediate vicinity of both stations will lift ridership levels overall beyond their current totals at each location, the study said.

The plan outlines various projects slated within the next 10 years. Included are station improvements, local station connections, passenger service levels, accommodating growing ridership, infrastructure safety enhancements and rail infrastructure capacity.

The infrastructure enhancements include crossing improvements at East Tabor Avenue in Fairfield, First Street in Dixon, Canon Road in Fairfield, Fry Road in Vacaville, A Street in Dixon and Midway Road in Solano County.

For more information about the rail plan update, contact the Solano Transportation Authority at 424-6075.

Crude By Rail, Derailment, Emergency Readiness & Response, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Hazmat notification, Tank car retirement, Tank car retrofit, Train inspection, Train length, Train speed

Feds tighten safeguards for oil trains, Illinois officials want more

April 18, 2015 Roger Straw

Repost from The Daily Herald, Suburban Chicago

Feds tighten safeguards for oil trains, advocates want more

By Marni Pyke, 4/17/2015 5:38 PM

Federal regulators are tightening some rules on transport of flammable liquids in tank cars. Bev Horne | Staff Photographer, December 2014

Federal regulators’ tweaks to rules for trains carrying flammable liquids released Friday didn’t impress local officials who are concerned about explosive fires.

“I’m fairly underwhelmed,” Barrington Mayor Karen Darch said regarding the recommendations by the Federal Railroad Administration and Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

The two agencies did act on one concern of suburban fire departments that first-responders wouldn’t get information on hazmat being shipped in a timely manner in cases of derailments or fires.

Regulators advised railroads and shippers they must provide first responders immediately with names and descriptions of hazardous materials, fire risks and the locations of tank cars on the train and their specifications, among other details.

Another recommendation was that “only the highest skilled inspectors” conduct brake and mechanical inspections of trains carrying large quantities of flammable liquids, including crude oil and ethanol.

“That struck me as incredibly odd,” Darch said, noting she was under the impression only well-qualified inspectors would be used in the first place given the volatility of some cargo on oil trains.

Regulators also issued an emergency order requiring trains with 20 or more continuous tank cars or 35 or more tank cars with Class 3 flammable liquids like crude oil stay at 40 mph or lower in urban areas.

Darch said restricting the speed limits to trains with 20 or 35 tank cars of flammable hazmat didn’t cover safety concerns when freights had smaller loads.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin called the changes “steps in the right direction, but they are not enough. We have to move to a new generation of tank cars that bring a new generation of safety. We are seeing the use of these tank cars moving crude oil in dramatically large numbers through rural and urban areas.”

Durbin is asking regulators to finalize new rules ordering retrofitting and replacement of older, accident-prone tank cars.

Since Feb. 16, four derailments of trains carrying crude oil with subsequent fire balls have occurred in the United States and Canada. One involved tank cars on a BNSF train outside of Galena March 5.