Tag Archives: Federal Regulation (U.S.)

Crude By Rail, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Funding for emergency response, Local Regulation

Chicago City Council approves resolution targeting crude oil train shipments

Repost from The Chicago Tribune

Chicago City Council approves resolution targeting crude oil train shipments

By Richard Wronski, September 9, 2014
Moving oil by train
Empty railroad tank cars snake their way into a storage yard. (Curtis Tate / MCT)

A joint Chicago City Council committee approved a resolution today calling on the federal government to impose more stringent restrictions on the shipments of crude oil by train than were proposed in July by U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx.

The action would put Chicago in the forefront of communities across the nation demanding tighter controls on the shipment of flammable liquids, especially crude oil trains, which are the equivalent of rolling pipelines.

In the most significant request, Chicago wants the federal government to give local municipalities the authority to impose a hazardous material transportation fee on shippers. The fee, which was not specified, would be used by the city to plan and respond to emergencies involving these shipments.

The measure, approved at a joint meeting of the finance and transportation committees, will go before the full city council Wednesday but approval was expected.

“The proceeds of such a fee would help insure that our firefighters and police officers who would answer the call for help have the necessary equipment and proper training to respond to a catastrophic railroad accident,” said Ald. Edward Burke, 14th, chairman of the finance committee and one of the resolution sponsors.

“Hopefully, our leaders in Washington will act promptly to protect millions of people in the Chicago area before, not after, a disaster strikes.”

The city’s action comes in response to the July 2013 runaway train carrying crude oil that derailed in Lac Megantic, Quebec, killing 47 people and destroying more than 100 homes and businesses.

The city is also calling for the federal restrictions to be imposed on trains carrying as few as 15 tank cars containing flammable liquids. The proposed federal rule on so-called “high-hazard flammable trains” would affect trains that carry 20 or more tank cars of flammable liquids, including crude oil and ethanol.

As many as 40 such trains come through Chicago and suburbs each week, the Tribune has reported.

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Emergency Readiness & Response, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Hazmat notification, Local Regulation, Regional regulation

Author of the 9/11 Rail provisions: Rail security requires local oversight of Bakken trains

Repost from Government Security News

Rail security requires local oversight of Bakken crude shipments

By Denise Rucker Krepp, 2014-09-09

The District of Columbia Council uncovered a serious homeland security flaw this week that should raise red flags for mayors and town managers around the country. In the nation’s capitol, local transportation officials aren’t conducting oversight over CSX and the goods it transports through the city. Similarly, officials are unfamiliar with the rail carrier’s security policies. DC transportation officials, as traditionally classified by the federal government, aren’t rail stakeholders with a need to know this information.

Rail stakeholders, as defined by the Transportation Security Administration, are class 1 freight railroads (CSX, Norfolk Southern), Amtrak, and regional and short line railroads. Members of these companies advise TSA on rail security matters and TSA provides them with security information. This relationship is further solidified in TSA’s strategic plan. The exclusive club does not include first responders nor local representatives from the communities through which the rail carriers transport goods.

By not including cities and towns as part of their stakeholder group, TSA has weakened the nation’s rail security system. Mayors and town managers control the first responder assets that will be used when the next Lac Megantic or Lynchburg occurs. TSA, however, as DC transportation officials told the DC Council this week, doesn’t require local officials to review rail security plans covering their jurisdiction. Absent a comprehensive review, they won’t know if their assets are sufficient to respond to a significant accident.

TSA’s definition of rail stakeholder was upended this summer when Secretary of Transportation Foxx mandated that rail carriers share information regarding Bakken crude with local officials.  For the first time, a federal department broadened the definition to include first responders and emergency managers. The Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act included information sharing requirements but TSA never followed through with them.

The lack of knowledge is problematic because local officials approve rail permits for projects like the proposed Virginia Avenue Tunnel project in DC. These officials however, have not include homeland security threat information in their permit analysis. They couldn’t. Local officials didn’t have this information before Secretary Foxx’s order. Thankfully, his order will increase the flow of information to local officials and will enable them to finally complete a more thorough analysis before making critical permitting decisions.

It’s my hope that Secretary Foxx’s order will be formalized by the Department of Homeland Security. DHS indicated in its Spring 2014 unified regulatory agenda, that TSA will be drafting regulations concerning rail security plans and other measures outlined in the 9/11 Act. These regulations will firmly establish the federal government’s expectations and one of these should be the inclusion of state and local officials in the decision making process.

Denise Rucker Krepp is an attorney, transportation and energy consultant, former special counsel to DOT and the U.S. Congress, and author of the 9/11 Rail provisions.
Federal Regulation (U.S.), U.S. Department of Transportation

Right-wing California lawmaker sees oil train regulation as DOT green conspiracy

Repost from The National Journal

Lawmaker: Regulators’ Oil-Train Safety Push Could Be Climate-Change Policy in Disguise

A California Republican who calls global warming a “fraud” believes the Transportation Department may be trying to curb use of fossil fuels.
By Ben Geman, September 9, 2014
Scorched oil tankers remain on July 10, 2013 at a derailment site in Lac-Megantic, Quebec.(Steeve Duguay/AFP/Getty Images)

A House Republican suggested the Transportation Department is hiding a stealth global-warming policy behind the guise of a rail-safety crackdown.

Federal regulators are writing new safety standards for trains that carry crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken shale formation, part of a broader regulatory initiative that follows a string of derailments and explosions on trains shipping the fuel. The regulators have increased their focus on the flammability of the fuel, as well as other risks of moving it by rail.

But Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California sees an ulterior motive: an effort to cripple fossil-fuel development in the name of a global-warming “theory.”

Rohrabacher, who has called global warming a “fraud,” leveled the charge at senior Transportation Department regulator Timothy Butters during a House Science Committee hearing on oil from the Bakken formation, which is moving around North America by rail in large volumes.

The agency’s efforts, Rohrabacher said, are “perhaps a facade to obtain what we clearly have as a goal of this administration, which is to reduce America’s use of fossil fuel, even though it is now being presented to us as something about safety.”

Rohrabacher accused Butters of refusing to answer direct questions during the hearing, during which panel Republicans challenged his department’s flammability assessment of the Bakken crude.

“You just won’t answer anything … because the agency may be involved in a play based on global-warming theory, trying to, again, suppress the usage and the use and availability of fossil fuels, and letting that be in the background, forcing situations and forcing people like you to have to go through those verbal acrobatics not to answer a question,” Rohrabacher told Butters.

Butters, who is the deputy administrator of the Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, disputed the allegation. He said that his agency is focused on the topic because of accidents—including last year’s derailment and explosion that killed 47 people in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec—and because of the amount of oil now moving around American railways.

His testimony noted, “At any given time, shipments of more than 2 million gallons are often traveling distances of more than 1,000 miles.”

“This material poses a risk. We are not trying to restrict the movement. We want to make sure that it moves safely. That is our role,” Butters told Rohrabacher.

“Energy and hazardous materials are critical to this nation’s economy. We strongly support that and we believe that. But our role is to ensure that this energy is moving safely through transportation. These crude-oil lines that carry these large volumes of flammable crude oil, which this material is, we need to ensure that it moves and it gets to its destination without incident,” he said.

The nation’s fracking boom has helped push North Dakota’s oil production above 1 million barrels per day, a five-fold increase over the last half-decade.

The federal Energy Information Administration, citing North Dakota Pipeline Authority data, says that between 60 percent and 70 percent of the oil produced there has been moved to refineries by rail during the first half of this year.

This article appears in the September 10, 2014 edition of NJ Daily.
Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Degasification, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Oil stabilization, State regulation, Volatility

MUST-READ: North Dakota seizes initiative in CBR degasification

Repost from Railway Age

North Dakota seizes initiative in CBR degasification

By  David Thomas, Sept. 4, 2014
North Dakota seizes initiative in CBR degasification

The vital other shoe in crude by rail reform will drop not in Ottawa or Washington, but in Bismark, N.Dak., where, in the void created by federal inaction, officials are preparing to use state jurisdiction over natural resources to order the degasification of petroleum at the wellhead.

The initiative follows months of opaque pronouncements by federal regulators in both Canada and the U.S. with respect to the need to render volatile crude oil safe before transport by rail.

A spokesman for Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) told Railway Age that rules for the pre-loading treatment of crude oil for shipment by rail are not on its reform agenda, despite earlier, apparently overly enthusiastic, pronouncements.

While Transport Canada and the U.S. Department of Transportation have responded to the succession of oil train explosions this year and last by focusing on railroad operations, hazmat classification, and tank car design, some have been muddled on the need to treat the volatile cargo itself before its loading into railcars—this despite their own warnings that crude, fracked from the mid-continent Baaken shale formation, has the explosivity of gasoline.

Some oil producers and shippers have resisted any new regulatory requirement that they process crude for transport by rail the way they already must for delivery by pipeline.

Removal of toxic, explosive, and corrosive gases from crude for transport by pipeline has been required for years under the regulatory authority of the PHMSA. But neither PHMSA nor its DOT sibling Federal Railroad Administration have seen fit to require similar treatment—variously termed “degasification”, “conditioning”, “stabilization”, or “normalization”—for crude, destined for shipment by rail.

Crude shippers have complained since the first oil train calamity in July 2013 at Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, that PHMSA regulations for testing and classifying oil for transport by rail were imprecise. Such confusion is only augmented by PHSMA’s twice-stated reference to a purported “requirement” that dangerous gases be removed before crude is loaded into railcars.

The most recent such PHMSA pronouncement in a June 11, 2014 letter to the National Transportation Safety Board reiterated an earlier safety alert:

“On Jan. 2, 2014, PHMSA also issued a safety alert warning of the flammability of the crude oil extracted from the Bakken Shale region in the United States. PHMSA noted that the alert reinforces the requirement to properly test, characterize, classify, and where appropriate, sufficiently degasify hazardous materials prior to transportation.”

Railway Age asked the PHMSA media relations office to clarify the requirement to “degasify,” and to cite the underlying legislative or regulatory authority. A PHMSA spokesperson researched the inquiry and responded that there was in fact no such legal basis in existence or under formal consideration. The PHMSA spokesman referred us to North Dakota, which was contemplating the introduction of compulsory degasification.

Indeed, the oil and gas division of the North Dakota Industrial Commission has announced a public hearing for Sept. 23, on the “oil conditioning practices” in the state’s three light-oil pools: Bakken, Three Forks, and Sanich. Oil producers are invited to propose “methods to effectively reduce the light hydrocarbons in crude oil.”

Division spokesperson Alison Ritter told Railway Age, “The hearing is a first step in conditioning the oil to make it as safe as possible for transport.” She said that gas/liquid separators are already required at all North Dakota wellheads. At issue is whether they are being effectively used to render so-called “hot crude” safe for rail transport.

Separators boil off light hydrocarbons such as ethane, butane, and propane from crude oil, reducing its vapor pressure and propensity to explode. Heavy and corrosive hydrogen sulfide is also removed for pipeline transport. None of this is compulsory for shipment by rail.

North Dakota had been an uncritical booster of CBR even after Lac-Mégantic, until the fourth of the conflagrations occurred Dec. 30, 2013, on the outskirts of Casselton, when a westbound BNSF grain train derailed in the path of an eastbound BNSF oil train.

North Dakota is also proceeding with the training and deployment of its own rail inspectors, who will enforce FRA and PHSMA regulations within the state.