Repost from DeSmog blog
Tue, 2014-03-18 06:00Sharon Kelly Spurred by the shale drilling rush that has progressed at breakneck speed, the railroad industry has moved fast to help drillers transport petroleum and its byproducts to consumers. Last year, trains hauled over 400…
Repost from TribTown.com, Seymour, Indiana
By JAY REEVES Associated Press – March 15, 2014
ALICEVILLE, Alabama — Environmental regulators promised an aggressive cleanup after a tanker train hauling 2.9 million gallons of crude oil derailed and burned in a west Alabama swamp in early November amid a string of North American oil train crashes.
So why is dark, smelly crude oil still oozing into the water four months later?
The isolated wetland smelled like a garage when a reporter from The Associated Press visited last week, and the charred skeletons of burned trees rose out of water covered with an iridescent sheen and swirling, weathered oil. A snake and a few minnows were some of the few signs of life.
An environmental group now says it has found ominous traces of oil moving downstream along an unnamed tributary toward a big creek and the Tombigbee River, less than 3 miles away. And the mayor of a North Dakota town where a similar crash occurred in December fears ongoing oil pollution problems in his community, too.
As the nation considers new means of transporting fuel over long distances, critics of crude oil trains have cited the Alabama derailment as an example of what can go wrong when tanker cars carrying millions of gallons of so-called Bakken crude leave the tracks. Questions about the effectiveness of the Alabama cleanup come as the National Transportation Safety Board considers tighter rules for the rail transportation of Bakken oil, which is produced mainly by the fracking process in the Bakken region of North Dakota and Montana. Oil production is increasing there, boosting the amount of oil being transported across the country.
Environmentalist John Wathen, who has conducted tests and monitored the Alabama site for months for Waterkeeper Alliance, said Genesee & Wyoming railroad and regulators did the bare minimum to spruce up an isolated, rural site and left once the tracks were repaired so trains could run again.
“I believe they really thought that because it’s out of sight, out of mind, out in the middle of a swamp, that nobody was going to pay attention,” said Wathen.
Regulators and the company deny any such thing occurred, however.
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, which oversaw the cleanup, say more than 10,700 gallons of oil were skimmed from the water after the derailment, and workers collected about 203,000 gallons of oil from damaged rail cars using pumps. Another 290 cubic yards of oily dirt was excavated with heavy equipment, or enough to cover a basketball court with soil nearly 2 feet deep.
Yet four months later, officials still say no one knows exactly how much oil was spilled. That’s mainly because an unknown amount of oil burned in a series of explosions and a huge fire that lasted for hours after the crash. Since no one knows how much oil burned, officials also can’t say how much oil may be in the swamp.
About a month after the crash, the head of Alabama’s environmental agency, Lance LeFleur, promised “aggressive recovery operations” in a written assessment for a state oversight commission. He said the oil had been contained in a “timely” manner and none had left the wetlands.
Michael Williams, a spokesman for the Connecticut-based Genesee & Wyoming, which owns the short-line Alabama & Gulf Coast Railway line where the crash occurred, said the company is still monitoring the site closely and maintaining a system of barriers meant to keep oil from spreading. The work is continuous, he said.
But regulators and the railroad confirm one of Wathen’s worst fears: That environmental agencies let the railroad repair the badly damaged rail bed and lay new tracks before all the spilled oil was removed. Wathen calls the move a mistake that’s behind the continuing seepage of oil into the water.
“I do agree that they needed to get the rail cars out. But there were other ways to do it,” said Wathen. “Those would have been more expensive.”
James Pinkney, an EPA spokesman in Atlanta, said the rail line had to be fixed quickly to remove oil and damaged rail cars that still contained crude from the wetland.
Agencies are now working with the company and its contractors to recover the remaining oil trapped in the rail bed, but it’s unclear when or how that might happen.
“The EPA and ADEM are continuing to work together to ensure all recoverable oil is removed from the site,” Pinkney said in a written response to questions.
Ed Overton, an environmental sciences professor at Louisiana State University, said spilled crude can linger at a site indefinitely if it’s buried in the ground. Depending on the amount of oil that remains, he said, containment devices may be needed in the swamp for at least a couple of years.
But Bakken crude evaporates quickly once exposed to air because of its composition, said Overton, so the fact that oil remains in the swamp isn’t “the end of the world.”
“It’s going to look bad for awhile,” he said. “It’s amazing how quickly Mother Nature can handle such things, but it will take time.”
The cause of the derailment — which happened at a wooden trestle that was destroyed by the flames and has since been replaced by buried culverts that let water flow underneath the tracks — remains under investigation by the Federal Railroad Administration.
The crash site appears in better shape now than right after the derailment, partly because burned tanker cars misshapen by explosions are gone. Much of the water surrounding the site appears clear, and the odor from the site isn’t bad enough to reach the home of Leila Hudgins, just a few hundred yards away.
“I haven’t smelled anything,” said Hudgins. “They did a good job. They hauled off truckload after truckload.”
The crash site, located off an old dirt road and a new one that was built during the response, is accessible both by car and foot, but Hudgins said she hasn’t looked closely at the spot where it happened.
The railroad said testing hasn’t detected any groundwater contamination, and EPA said air monitoring ended about a month after the crash when it became apparent there were no airborne health hazards.
Still, questions linger. Wathen said he has been taking water samples several hundred yards downstream from the crash site and has detected the chemical fingerprint of so-called Bakken crude, which the train was carrying when it derailed.
“There’s no question it is outside their containment area, and I think it’s even further away,” said Wathen. “This is an environmental disaster that could go on for years.”
The Alabama train was on a southbound run when it derailed less than 3 miles south of Aliceville, a town of about 2,400 people near the Mississippi line. Another oil train derailed and burned in December at Casselton, North Dakota, and 47 people died in July when a train carrying Bakken oil exploded and burned in Quebec.
The mayor of Casselton, Ed McConnell said he has been keeping up with the Alabama cleanup because spilled oil also was buried under the rebuilt railroad tracks near his town of 2,400 people. He worries that oil will reappear on the ground at Casselton as the spring thaw begins in coming weeks.
“It’s still in the ground here, too,” said McConnell. “They’ve hauled a lot of dirt and stuff out. But they covered up the (oily) dirt before getting it all up and rebuilt the track to get it going.”
Alabama’s environmental agency said it still regularly visits the wreck site, which is encircled with the same sort of absorbent fencing, oil-snaring pom-poms and plastic barriers that were used on the Gulf Coast after the BP well blowout in 2010.
Once the “emergency” phase ends, the state environmental agency will install wells to monitor groundwater, said spokesman Jerome Hand.
Government regulators will approve any plans for removing remaining oil from the site, he said.
Repost from Longview Daily News, Longview, WA
March 8, 2014 By Erik Olson
U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., is demanding the oil industry eliminate older, unsafe tanker cars that are hauling crude oil through the Pacific Northwest, including those that pass oil through Cowlitz and Columbia counties.
At a Senate hearing Thursday on rail safety in Washington, D.C., Cantwell pressed industry executives on when they will pull cars known as “DOT 111” off the rails in favor of newer, sturdier models that are less likely to be punctured and spill.
The safety of oil trains has come under increasing scrutiny following the increase in drilling from the Bakken shale fields centered in North Dakota. Communities on rail lines have expressed concerns of a growing risk of fiery explosions if oil trains derail and detonate highly flammable Bakken sweet crude, and regulators have been slow to respond.
Critics warn about the possibility of disasters like last year’s crude oil train derailment in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, which caused an explosion that killed 47 people.
“We’ve gone from four years ago — having basically nothing on rail by crude — to now having something like 408,000 carloads of crude. Knowing when those cars are going to be off those rails — these cars that the National Transportation Safety Board has already said are unacceptable — this is a key issue for me and for my state,” Cantwell said in a written transcript.
Oil industry executives, who own most of the tanker cars, told Cantwell said they hope to phase out 60 percent of the older cars by 2015 but couldn’t say when they’d all be off the rails.
In the Pacific Northwest, most of those trains are headed to the BP oil refinery in Anacortes near the San Juan Islands and to a converted ethanol production facility at Port Westward owned by Boston-based Global Partners.
Some of those trains pass through Cowlitz County on the way to the refinery, and other oil trains pass through Rainier en route to the oil export terminal at Port Westward.
Rainier Mayor Jerry Cole said he supports Cantwell’s efforts but trusts Global to operate safely while creating jobs in the area. He said a Global official called him this week and said the company is moving the oil as safely as possible. About a dozen trains with about 100 cars each currently come through downtown Rainier per month, 22 fewer than Global is allowed by its permit.
“The safer rail cars, at the end of the day, are good for everyone along that line, from their end destination to the beginning,” Cole said.
The legality of some of those shipments remains under dispute. Oregon state regulators said this week that Global has violated its permits by moving 297 million gallons of oil to Port Westward between December 2012 and November 2013 when its permit allowed 50 million gallons. The company is disputing the claim.
Railroad officials note that they don’t own tanker cars — the oil companies do — but they are installing safety measures on unit trains and mainlines, such as better brakes and additional locomotives. They said they applauded Cantwell’s call for increased safety.
“If something is on our rails, and we’re carrying it, we’re going to do it in the safest ways possible,” Burlington Northern Santa Fe spokeswoman Courtney Wallace said.
Repost from The Chemical Engineer… news and jobs from the chemical, biochemical and process engineering sectors
Canadian authorities test Lac Megantic oil
Richard Jansen 07/03/2014
The oil was found to have a flash point similar to unleaded gasoline
THE oil shipment involved in last year’s deadly Lac Megantic disaster has characteristics closer to gasoline than normal crude, according to a report by Canadian authorities.
Almost 50 people were killed when a train carrying crude produced from the US’ Bakken shale play exploded into a fireball after derailing in the Canadian town of Lac Megantic. In the aftermath of the disaster questions were raised over how the oil reacted so violently, as the properties of regular crude should make it very unlikely to explode.
In its engineering report, the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) says that the level of hazard posed by the oil “was not accurately documented” when it had been shipped. Using samples taken from the handful of tankers that didn’t derail, the regulator found that the oil at Lac Megantic had an extremely low flash point – the temperature at which it will form a flammable mixture with air – “similar to that of unleaded gasoline.”
“The large quantities of spilled crude oil, the rapid rate of release, and the oil’s high volatility and low viscosity were likely the major contributors to the large post-derailment fireball and pool fire,” it concludes.
In the wake of Lac Megantic there have been several accidents involving oil being transported from North American shale plays. Late last year a 106-car train came off the rails near the town of Casselton in North Dakota, US, and exploded. Though none of the incidents since Lac Megantic have caused a fatality, transport regulators across the region have looked to improve their safety regulations, with the US Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration announcing plans to reinforce its testing standards for crude.
The accidents have brought fresh attention to the increasing amount of oil transported across North America by rail. As production from shale oil and oil sands continues to grow faster than the pipeline network, rail has become an increasingly important method of transportation.
According to a report by the Association of American Railroads (AAR) released last year, in 2008 just 9,500 carloads of crude oil travelled by rail. By 2012 this had grown to nearly 234,000 carloads, with “another big jump” expected for 2013.