Tag Archives: Lynchburg VA

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Emergency Readiness & Response, Hazmat notification, Massive increase in crude-by-rail

Previously secret details: Bakken crude oil rolling over Ohio rails

January 29, 2015 Roger Straw

Bakken crude oil rolls over Ohio rails

By Laura Arenschield & Rick Rouan, January 29, 2015

Ohio’s railroad tracks handle at least 45 million gallons of Bakken crude oil in a week. This view of tracks is from Groveport Road on the South Side. | Tom Dodge | Dispatch

Millions of gallons of some of the most volatile crude oil in North America are being transported on rail lines through Ohio each week, according to reports that the state had kept secret until this week.

The railroad-company reports show that 45 million to 137 million gallons of Bakken crude oil come through Ohio each week from North Dakota oil fields on the way to East Coast refineries.

Two million to 25 million gallons a week come through Franklin County alone.

Bakken crude oil is desirable to oil and gas companies because it requires less refining than other shale oil to be turned into diesel fuel and gasoline. It also is highly flammable.

Prompted by a 2013 train derailment and explosion that killed 47 people in Quebec and an explosion in Lynchburg, Va., last April, federal regulators began requiring railroads in May to report the average weekly number of trains carrying at least 1 million gallons of Bakken crude.

Those reports are sent to state emergency-management agencies. The U.S. Department of Transportation has said the files don’t contain sensitive security details, prompting some states, including Virginia and Washington, to make the reports public.

Despite requests from environmental groups, citizens and news outlets, including one from The Dispatch in July, Ohio would not release the reports, citing an exemption in the public-records law meant to prevent acts of terrorism.

Then this week, the state released the records to Lea Harper, managing director of the FreshWater Accountability Project, an environmental advocacy group.

The state released the reports to The Dispatch yesterday.

“So many other states are doing it, and our legal staff started looking into it and made a determination that it probably was not as volatile of information as it first seemed to be,” said Joseph Andrews, a spokesman for the State Emergency Response Commission in Ohio.

One of Harper’s relatives lives in a nursing home in Seneca County, near railroad tracks where Bakken crude-oil shipments pass each week. She said she worries about his safety.

“Anything that has happened in the past can certainly happen again,” she said, referencing the explosions in Virginia and Quebec.

No Bakken shipments have exploded or caught fire in Ohio, Andrews said.

Transport of crude oil via rail has surged in recent years amid the boom in the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota.

The amount of crude petroleum hauled on U.S. railroads increased from more than 20 million tons in 2012 to nearly 40 million tons in 2013, the most recent data available through the Association of American Railroads. In 2011, about 5 million tons of crude was hauled by rail.

That number includes all oil, not just Bakken crude oil.

With nearly 5,300 miles of track, Ohio has one of the densest concentrations of rail in the nation and is a crossroads between the Bakken shale formation and East Coast refineries.

Most of the Bakken crude traveling through Ohio is being transported on CSX rail lines. The CSX report shows that 30 million to 105 million gallons of Bakken crude are hauled through Ohio each week. Norfolk Southern moves 13 million to 28 million gallons of Bakken crude.

Norfolk Southern spokesman David Pidgeon said the company opposes public release of its routes for Bakken crude for security reasons.

“We have to balance that openness with operating a secure network,” Pidgeon said.

In an email, CSX spokeswoman Kristin Seay said crude-oil shipments represent less than 2 percent of the freight the railroad transports.

She said the company often goes beyond federal standards for track inspection and stays well within speed limits.

In February 2013, railroads opted for voluntary measures to ensure safe shipment of crude oil, including reduced speed limits and more inspections.

Canadian Pacific Railway runs an average of three trains per week on a short stretch of Norfolk Southern rail that cuts through northwestern Ohio. Those trains cross from Indiana into Williams County and travel northeast through Fulton County before crossing into Michigan.

The train that exploded in Quebec started as a Canadian Pacific train. The company transferred the train to Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway in Canada before the derailment.

Canadian Pacific has made several changes since, including tighter security requirements, more frequent inspections of tracks and equipment and more worker training, said Andy Cummings, a company spokesman.

“We took a very close look at our practices,” he said.

The reports sent to state emergency-management agencies do not say when Bakken crude oil is coming through Ohio. Railroad companies are not required to report schedules for those shipments.

In Cuyahoga County, 29 million to 45 million gallons of Bakken crude travel along rail lines each week.

“It’s a concern,” said Walter Topps, Cuyahoga County’s emergency-management agency administrator. “It’s not a concern in the sense that we’re not ready. But there’s an awareness in the first-responder community, among fire departments … we’re all aware of this.”

Crude By Rail, Derailment, Emergency Readiness & Response, Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Oil spill

Preparing for a railway disaster in Ashland, Virginia

January 28, 2015 Roger Straw

Repost from The Herald-Progress, Ashland, VA

Preparing for a railway disaster in Ashland

January 28, 2015

Every day, 40 trains carry 30,000 loads of freight – some containing volatile materials – while another 22 trains transport 6,000 passengers through the “Center of the Universe.”

A lot could go wrong.

But CSX and local emergency services officials assured members of town council last week that stringent planning and strong communication between agencies should help ensure a swift response in the event of a train emergency or prevent one all together.

The issue of rail safety is tied to what Bryan Rhode, CSX regional vice president in charge of state government affairs in Virginia, called an “energy revolution” currently underway in the United States.

Crowds line the train tracks in downtown Ashland as a CSX train makes its way through town in this 2012 Herald-Progress file photo. — Crowds line the train tracks in downtown Ashland as a CSX train makes its way through town in this 2012 Herald-Progress file photo

With increased domestic oil production come questions about how to get those resources to market. Rhode said that traditionally, crude oil would be transported by pipeline, but that infrastructure doesn’t exist in many of the new areas where the raw materials are being extracted, and that’s where rail comes in.

“This idea of moving crude [oil] by rail really sprung up a couple years ago,” Rhode said. “I’ve talked to people who have been with CSX much longer than I have and they tell me if somebody had come to them five years ago and said we’d be moving crude oil by rail, they would have said, ‘You’re crazy.’”

But it’s now something railroads are doing in increasing volumes even though Rhode said transporting crude oil still only constitutes about 2 percent of CSX’s business.

The issue has received increasing attention following a CSX train derailment in Lynchburg last April, when a large shipment of crude oil exploded along the James River and near the city’s downtown sector.

“In a lot of ways we got very lucky because nobody was hurt or killed,” Rhode said. “But it was still something that impacted Lynchburg, impacted the James River and something that we strive every day to avoid allowing to happen again.”

Even prior to the Lynchburg crash, there had been a push for safer crude oil transport. In February 2013 the Federal Railroad Administration issued a number of emergency orders and regulations aimed at enhancing safety. Following the crash, Rhode said the federal government implemented more stringent regulations concerning the shipment of crude oil by rail and HAZMAT materials, in general.

But despite those regulations and what Rhode called a culture of safety at CSX, accidents still can and do occur.

“We do everything we can to prevent accidents from happening, but when you’re moving huge amounts of material in large equipment, we all recognize that sometimes, despite our best efforts, things do happen,” Rhode said. “Our goal is zero preventable accidents.”

Emergency plans in place

Hanover is contained in the RF&P sub-division of what CSX calls its Baltimore division, bookended by Richmond to the south and Philadelphia to the north.

According to Henry Moore, division chief of planning for Hanover Fire-EMS, molten sulfur and crude oil comprise half of all hazardous materials making their way through the county on a daily basis. Ethanol carloads are also increasing with about 210,000 gallons of the volatile substance making its way by rail to Stafford County on a daily basis.

Moore said Hanover and the region have bolstered their foam suppression capabilities in preparation for a derailment or catastrophic event and that regional response teams routinely participate in emergency exercises in preparation for railroad accidents where hazardous materials are present.

Hanover has in place a standard operating guideline for responding to railroad emergencies and also maintains an initial responder checklist for public safety personnel created for joint response to train crises.

Anthony Callahan, deputy chief of the Ashland Police Department, said all Ashland officers are trained in how to handle critical incidents. In the advent of a train-related incident, responding officers are taught to first establish communication and to contact other resources. Officers are also instructed to designate a “danger zone,” where only emergency responders are allowed, and to set up inner and outer perimeters. They would then implement an incident command post to direct emergency personnel and secure a staging area for other first responders.

However, Callahan said that his officers will assume different roles based on the severity of the actual incident. In cases where a car is stuck on the tracks, for example, Callahan said the first responding unit would get in touch with CSX and work to get the occupants out of the vehicle, with the immediate consideration being the health and safety of individuals on scene and in the area.

In cases where there has been a collision requiring any sort of spill cleanup, Callahan said Fire-EMS would take the lead, with APD in a support role.

In case of an incident, Rhode said CSX also brings a number of resources to the table, including trained personnel and heavy equipment staged throughout its network to ensure a quick response.

If a community is impacted, CSX steps up to offer relocation services and local aid.

Rhode said that in the advent of an actual emergency, cross-jurisdictional communication is key. In the case of the Lynchburg incident, officials from CSX had existing relationships with state and local emergency response teams.

“We weren’t handing out business cards. We all knew each other; we’d worked together before,” Rhode said. “If you don’t know each other and you’re not talking to each other before [an emergency] happens, you’re probably going to have issues.”

Fortunately, ties are strong between CSX and local fire, EMS and law enforcement agencies, officials told town council.

Rhode said CSX partners with local first responders to make sure they have the training they need to effectively respond to an incident. This takes place through online courses and local “tabletop” exercises on up to specialized, in-person, training dealing specifically with crude oil accidents.

Moore said Fire-EMS is in the final stages of planning a joint Amtrak derailment tabletop exercise in Ashland with Randolph-Macon College and the Ashland Police Department. The training should take place in the coming spring, one more safeguard aimed at ensuring this train town also remains a safe town.

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Phillips 66, San Luis Obispo County, Santa Maria Refinery, Tar sands crude

San Luis Obispo Refinery Wants Oil by Train

January 26, 2015 Roger Straw

Repost from The Santa Barbara Independent

SLO Refinery Wants Oil by Train

Phillips 66 Runs into Public Resistance over Proposal to Lay New Tracks and Unload More Canadian Crude

By Natalie Cherot, January 23, 2015

Courtesy Photo A slow-moving pipeline moves a haul of crude oil to a refinery just north of the Santa Barbara County border. Stand on the nearby coast’s 18,000-year-old sand dunes and look away from the sea, and a perfect view emerges of the expansive Phillips 66 Santa Maria Refinery. The name is a misnomer. The San Luis Obispo facility on the Nipomo Mesa is 17 miles northwest from the City of Santa Maria. Directly south is the Santa Maria River.

Golden Sierra Madre mountains shimmer in the distance, and hearty sage scrub surrounds its perimeter alongside grazing cattle. The night sky around the facility is never dark; its aquarium lights border on festive. The illumination is necessary because the refinery is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It begins the process of turning crude into a finished product like gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel, and pumps the semi-refined batches 200 miles north to the San Francisco Bay Area plants for finishing.

With oil prices dropping and California supplies both dwindling and facing harsh competition from North Dakota, much speculation swirls on the question of what kind of oil will arrive to the refinery on the dunes in the coming years. Right now it is “mostly used for California-produced oil,” said Phillips 66 spokesperson Rich Johnson.

But as of 2013, Phillips 66’s newest product is Canadian tar sands, a thick, gooey combination of clay, sand, water, and viscous bitumen. It’s hard to control and expensive to process. The Kearl Lake tar sands field cuts through Alberta’s boreal forest and wetlands, and has been turned into a mined landscape. An estimated 170 billion more barrels are still available for the taking.

In the summer of 2013, Phillips 66 submitted permit applications to San Luis Obispo County’s Planning Commission to add 1.3 miles of train track to its Santa Maria Refinery’s existing rail spur so crude can be delivered by train rather than by pipe. The proposed upgrades, which include five parallel tracks, an unloading facility, and new on-site pipelines, wouldn’t increase the amount of crude processed at the facility — volume is capped by the county’s Air Pollution Control District — but they reflect an increasing amount of oil train traffic across the country. BusinessWeek.com reported that it’s tripled in the last four years.

According to the project’s draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR), the facility would be able to handle five train unloads a week for a maximum of 250 a year. Each train with about 80 tanks on board would carry between 1.8 million and 2.1 million gallons of crude.

A first draft of the EIR — which indicated that both Canadian tar sands and North Dakota Bakken formation crude would be carried on the trains — was published that fall and received 800 public comments. The massive amount of feedback, much of it negative, prompted the Planning Commission to delay a final decision on the project. The commission issued a second 889-page draft EIR in October 2014, and a few weeks from now, a public comment period will take place. The date has not been finalized.

The biggest contention in the first draft was about Bakken crude. “The bottom line is Bakken Crude likes to burn and it will not take much to get it going,” wrote Paul Lee, battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection in a letter to the San Luis Obispo Planning and Building Department. For preparation of the second draft EIR, Phillips 66 requested the county “delete statements suggesting that the Bakken oilfield as the most likely source of crude oil.” The new draft EIR states no Bakken will arrive by rail. Phillips’s spokesperson Rich Johnson said the refinery can’t handle the sweeter, lighter Bakken crude, as it specializes in the ultra-heavy tar sands.

Four accidents involving Bakken crude are mentioned in the latest report. A 30,000-barrel spill occurred in April 2014 in Lynchburg, Virginia, when a transport train derailed and erupted into flames. In November 2013, a train jumped the tracks in Aliceville, Alabama. Twelve tanker cars of Bakken spilled and caught fire. The next month, another oil train crashed in Casselton, North Dakota, where 20 cars of Bakken exploded and burned for 24 hours. Forty-seven people died when a train carrying the crude derailed and exploded in Quebec on July 2013.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has issued a warning to move transportation of Bakken oil away from highly populated areas because of explosion risks. “Most think that Crude will not get going unless it gets warmed up first and in some cases that is correct, [but] Bakken Crude does not need to be aggravated to burn or even explode,” wrote Lee. “The NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) is concerned about its ability to explode so much in fact that there is a recommendation to have rail avoid populated areas.”

Phillips 66’s rail expansion plan is part of larger national strategy to better accommodate tar sands coming out of the ground quicker than the current system of pipelines can handle. “Our real challenge that we have, or opportunity that we have, is to get advantaged crudes to the East Coast and West Coast,” said Greg Garland, chairman and CEO of Phillips 66, at the Barclays CEO Energy-Power Conference last year. “So we’re working that in terms of moving Canadian crudes down into California or building rail facilities.”

Two thousands miles north in Alberta, Canada, the contentious Keystone XL pipeline would transport tar sands through Montana, Nebraska, Illinois, Oklahoma, and Houston. The pipeline’s foes claim the fuel is too emission-intensive and corrosive to pipelines. Supporters say if the Keystone XL is blocked, tar sands will come by the more dangerous transportation methods of boat or rail. Recent Philips 66 literature states: “Until new pipeline projects come online, rail is in many cases the easiest and most cost efficient way to get advantaged crude to some of our refineries.”

Trains coming and going from Santa Maria Refinery would travel the path of the Union Pacific Rail, on tracks shared by Amtrak. They would make the journey north through the Nipomo Mesa, up the precarious Cuesta Grade through Paso Robles, Salinas, and San Jose. Then they head through Richmond, then Berkeley. Richmond and Berkeley city councils recently passed resolutions calling for stricter regulations on crude oil trains.

The paths of the trains coming from the south — and carrying crude from any number of sources — are unclear and not ironed out in the draft EIR, but they would likely go through Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. A potential path indicated in the report heads through downtown Moorpark at the eastern edge of Ventura County after it passes through Simi Valley, but that potential route may have hit a glitch.

On December 17, the Moorpark City Council voted to send a letter to the San Luis Obispo Planning Commission opposing Phillip 66’s proposal because of its potentially hazardous risks. “I feel strongly that we need to show a little bit of leadership here as a city to formally object to this,” said one councilmember. “Hopefully other cities along this track will as well.” According to the report, once the trains leave Moorpark they could head through Camarillo to Ventura and along the coast to Carpinteria, Santa Barbara, and Goleta.

Johnson does not see much long-term job growth — or even stability — at the refinery given its current pipeline setup and a recent dip in statewide supplies. To stay competitive, company officials have argued, the refinery needs to revamp its intake methods so it can accept crude from other sources. “We are trying to keep the jobs we have,” Johnson said of the 200 people working at the plant. “Oil production in California is on the decline.” Rumors of a too-twisted and warped Monterey Shale formation from years of tectonic activity became a public reality in May when the government agency, Energy Information Administration, downgraded a predicted 13.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil to 600 million.

Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, Government regulation, Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Oil Industry, Rail industry

Oil Trains: The Industry Speaks for Itself – a record of denial and deceit, in photos

January 5, 2015 Roger Straw

Repost from Sightline Daily
[Editor: These images would be great for posters (see below) – and the author speaks for me when he writes, “Government regulators have been slow to act, their responses painfully milquetoast. As a result, much of what I do involves research into the often-complex details of federal rulemaking procedures, rail car design standards, insurance policies, and the like—all the issues that Sightline is shining a light on….Yet on some level it’s not about any of that. It’s about a reckless and unaccountable oil industry that—in the most literal and obvious way—profits by putting our lives at risk. Every time I hear one of their accountability-shirking lines, I can’t help recalling images from those tragedies and near-tragedies.” – RS]

Oil Trains: The Industry Speaks for Itself – a record of denial and deceit, in photos

By Eric de Place and Keiko Budech, December 30, 2014

A year and a half after an oil train inferno ended 47 lives in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, the crude-by-rail industry rolls on, virtually unimpeded. It’s hard not to feel horrified when, one after another, we register the place names of oil train explosions—Aliceville, Alabama; Casselton, View PostNorth Dakota; Lynchburg, Virginia—as grim warnings of what could happen in so many other North American communities.

Government regulators have been slow to act, their responses painfully milquetoast. As a result, much of what I do involves research into the often-complex details of federal rulemaking procedures, rail car design standards, insurance policies, and the like—all the issues that Sightline is shining a light on.

Yet on some level it’s not about any of that. It’s about a reckless and unaccountable oil industry that—in the most literal and obvious way—profits by putting our lives at risk. Every time I hear one of their accountability-shirking lines, I can’t help recalling images from those tragedies and near-tragedies. The juxtaposition is startling that we decided to undertake a small photo project to capture it. We hope that you’ll find the following useful in your own work, and if so, that you’ll share the images with your own networks.

It’s a practically a given that we’ll hear more empty reassurances and lies from oil and rail executives in the new year, and as growing numbers of oil trains crisscross the continent, there’s every likelihood we’ll have another catastrophe to catalog. To grasp the magnitude of the oil industry’s cynicism, it’s best to hear them in their own words.