By Tony Bizjak, Sep. 2, 2014
A BNSF train carrying 98 tankers of crude oil passes through midtown Sacramento at 4 p.m. Monday en route from the North Dakota Bakken oil fields to a refinery in Richmond. | Jake Miille / Special to The Sacramento Bee
A bill by Sacramento Assemblyman Roger Dickinson requiring more disclosure about crude oil rail shipments has passed the Legislature and has been sent to the governor for his consideration. The bill is the last of several steps taken by the Legislature this summer to deal with safety concerns about the growing phenomena of 100-car oil trains rolling through Sacramento and other California cities on their way to coastal and Central Valley refineries.
The bill, AB 380, orders railroad companies to provide state and local emergency officials with information about oil and hazardous materials that may be shipped through their jurisdictions. It also also requires carriers, when shipping volatile Bakken crude oil, to provide the state with information about the volume of oil and timing of the shipment beforehand. The law also directs carriers to furnish the state with copies of the carrier’s hazardous material emergency response plan.
“The risk of catastrophic injury to life and property by rail accident has grown dramatically,” said Dickinson. “State and local emergency response agencies face new challenges when dealing with this amount of hyper-flammable or heavy crude oil. In order to prepare our emergency response agencies and protect our communities, it is essential that emergency response agencies have the information they need about the crude oil cargo in order to minimize any damage from an accident.”
A series of derailments and explosions has thrown a spotlight on the increasing numbers of crude oil train shipments in the United States. State energy officials say at this point only small amounts of California’s crude oil is arriving via trains from North Dakota and other areas of North America, but the amount is growing. Oil companies are building the capacity to accept as much as 23 percent of the state’s oil needs via train in 2016.
Reacting to statewide concerns, the Legislature and governor passed two budget bills in June to bolster state spill prevention and response efforts. One bill funded seven new rail and rail bridge inspectors for the state Public Utilities Commission. A second budget bill applied a fee to oil companies’ rail shipments to fund a state Office of Spill Prevention and Response program protecting inland waterways.
A last-minute bill, SB 1319, sought to impose a second fee on rail transports to support emergency hazardous materials response training. It died after oil industry officials complained the legislation duplicates other state and federal safety efforts, and that there was not adequate time to discuss and vet the bill.
Currently, only one rail company, BNSF, is transporting more than 1 million gallons of Bakken crude oil per train into California. According to reports the railroad is required to file with state emergency officials, a train carrying Bakken travels through Redding, Sacramento and Stockton on its way to a transfer station in the Bay Area several times a month, perhaps as often as weekly. The train uses the tracks that run through midtown Sacramento between 19th and 20th streets. BNSF has declined to offer more details about those shipments.
From an email by Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Chapter [Editor: For details about participating in the upcoming meeting of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, see below. – RS
Isn’t your family’s health more important than Big Oil profits?
Jess Dervin-Ackerman, August 27, 2014
For too long, the Bay Area’s five oil refineries have been polluting our air and water and pouring money into local politics to ensure they can continue their dirty, harmful practices. In the Bay Area alone, air pollution kills nearly 2,000 people each year.
We need the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (the body tasked with regulating the refineries) to take strong and bold action to protect our communities from the toxic air pollution spewing from these facilities. Send a message to the Air District Board supporting a proactive approach to regulating refinery emissions now!
The Chevron refinery in Richmond is one of the worst offenders; two years ago this month, a huge fire at the facility sent upwards of 15,000 Richmond residents to the hospital with respiratory problems. Right now, the Chevron refinery is emitting fine particulate matter that causes heart and lung disease—and the rules allow them to do it. We need stronger regulations that prevent toxic polluters from poisoning Bay Area families, as well as specific action to cap fine particulate emissions from the Chevron refinery.
Add your voice to the growing movement in the Bay Area calling for strong and bold action to reduce dangerous emissions and carbon pollution from the refineries along the Bay.
Thank you for taking action to protect the health and safety of our community and the planet.
Jess Dervin-Ackerman
Conservation Organizer
Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Chapter
P.S. — Forward this message to a friend!
Please attend the September 3rd Air District Board meeting to support cleanup and emissions restrictions.
Support – including emission limits in BAAQMD’s proposed Bay Area refineries rule. Oppose – Big Oil’s proposal of a ‘monitoring only’ rule that threatens to study us to death.
What: Meeting of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District Board of Directors—write “For Cleanup” on your speaker card
When: Wednesday, September 3 (all morning—suggest arrival by 9 AM)
Where: BAAQMD offices, 939 Ellis Street, San Francisco, CA 94109 (Ellis near Van Ness Ave., about eight blocks from Civic Center BART Station)
Our fight to stop the bomb trains traveling through our backyards
By Suma Peesapati, August 28, 2014
Bruce Crummy/2013 AP file photo | An oil train derailed on Dec. 30 in Casselton, N.D. It was one of a handful of recent incidents of rail cars carrying crude oil exploding and going up in flames.
“This issue needs to be acted on very quickly. There is a very high risk here that hasn’t been addressed. We don’t need a higher body count before they move forward.”
It was a mark-my-words moment from National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Deborah Hersman at her farewell appearance before stepping down from the position in April.
She was speaking about the explosive growth of the use of unsafe tanker cars to haul crude oil extracted from the Bakken reserve in North Dakota and Montana to refineries across our nation. When involved in derailments, many of these cars carrying the highly volatile fossil fuel are vulnerable to puncture and explosion upon impact. They were the cars that were involved in explosions in Aliceville, Alaska, in November, Casselton, N.D., a month later and, of course, last summer’s horrific reckoning in Lac Megantic, Quebec.
Not two weeks after Hersman made her remarks, a train carrying Bakken crude derailed in Lynchburg, Va., igniting a roaring blaze and prompting the evacuation of the entire downtown. The tankers involved, however, weren’t the cars that the former chairwoman was warning about. They were a tougher, supposedly safer car tank car that the rail and oil industry is slowly moving toward adopting. It begs the question, though, are these newer cars going to be safe enough?
This question recently hit home when a local news station exposed a clandestine crude by rail-loading operation in Richmond, here in the Bay Area, that had been flying under the radar for months. After making a backroom deal with the local air district, Kinder Morgan secured approval to introduce this highly explosive fracked crude through urban Bay Area neighborhoods without any public notice or environmental review.
Within two weeks after the story broke, Earthjustice sued the air district and Kinder Morgan, demanding a full public airing of the project’s risks to public health and safety. A hearing on the merits of this case is scheduled for Sept. 5 in San Francisco Superior Court. While we await our day in court, Kinder Morgan is unloading its crude just a half-mile from Washington Elementary School, in a low-income community of color that the air district recognizes as already overburdened by the very same carcinogenic toxic air contaminants released by handling Bakken crude.
Piling on to this environmental injustice, this crude is being loaded onto tanker trucks that are not certified by California. Those trucks then travel on Bay Area roadways until this dangerous commodity reaches its ultimate destination — the Tesoro refinery in Martinez.
Tesoro Martinez is also accepting Bakken crude from similar rail-to-truck crude transfer operations in Sacramento, thereby compounding the risk of accident. With some of the most treacherous mountain passes in the country, and a dilapidated railway system that was never designed or upgraded to transport such dangerous cargo, these trains are ticking time bombs.
The anemic response from state and federal regulators has been disappointing. Fortunately, our state and federal environmental laws gives private citizens a voice demand more than “business as usual.”
Suma Peesapati is an attorney for San Francisco-based Earthjustice.
Repost from The Benicia Herald [Editor: Sue Kibbe also submitted her “Dream for Benicia” to the Benicia Planning Commission as a comment for the record on Valero Crude By Rail. – RS]
My dream for Benicia
by Sue Kibbe
I HAVE A DREAM THAT ONE DAY BENICIA WILL RISE UP and be known across the nation as the Little City that said “No” to Big Oil, putting human life and environmental stewardship above human greed and the insatiable quest for increased profits. What a proud day it would be if Benicia said the risk to the thousands living up-rail is too high a price to pay.
Because it is too high a price to pay. The effect on the environment from a spill or explosion would be an unmitigated disaster, a fire that cannot be extinguished, a toxic slick destroying every living thing.
Crude-by-rail has been called “a disaster in the making” by more than one expert. A railway safety consultant has warned, “We’ve got all kinds of failings on all sides, inadequacies that are coming to light because trains are blowing up all over the place.” The Federal Railroad Administration is able to inspect only two-tenths of 1 percent of railroad operations each year. With 140,000 rail miles across the nation, regular inspection of the tracks is impossible.
The Department of Transportation has yet to provide regulations for crude-by-rail transport. Expect pushback from the rail industry. Safety measures such as “positive train control” (PTC) were recommended 45 years ago, yet the technology operates on only a tiny slice of America’s rail network. The railroads have preempted local control and can make routing decisions without public disclosure.
Meanwhile, aging rail trestles and lines such as the one through Feather River Canyon — lines that were never constructed for such heavy traffic — continue to be used with greater frequency. The New York Times reported last month that “400,000 carloads of crude oil traveled by rail last year . . . up from 9,500 in 2008. . . . From 1975 to 2012, federal records show, (railroads) spilled 800,000 gallons of crude oil. Last year alone, they spilled more the 1.15 million gallons.”
Scott Smith, a scientist whose work has focused on oil spills, has studied samples of the Bakken crude oil from three accident sites. He may be the only expert outside the oil industry to have analyzed this crude. All the samples he studied share the same high levels of volatile organic compounds (VOC) and alkane gases in exceptional combinations. Smith says 30 percent to 40 percent of Bakken crude is made up of toxic and explosive gases. “Any form of static electricity will ignite this stuff and blow it up,” he said.
The Wall Street Journal, based on its own analysis, reported that Bakken has significantly more combustible gases and a higher vapor pressure than oil from other formations. Basically, its flash point is dangerously low, and a chain reaction from tank car to tank car is inevitable.
Examining the draft environmental impact report (DEIR)
Pay attention to the wording in Valero’s proposal: “The Project would not increase the amount of crude oil that can be processed at the refinery . . .” It never says the amount of crude oil that “is being processed” at the refinery. In the DEIR, page 3-2, it says: “The Refinery’s crude oil processing rate is limited to an annual average of 165,000 barrels per day (daily maximum of 180,000 barrels) by its operating permit.” That is a huge increase from the 70,000 barrels per day that it says are processed now. With the 70,000 by rail per day, add 18 vessels shipping 350,000 barrels per vessel — that equals 6,300,000 barrels, a total of 31,850,000 barrels per year — thus an increase in processing, and hence in emissions.
We have read in a Bay Area newspaper that “Valero was named by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this year as one of California’s top distributors of dangerous substances. It was second to the ConocoPhillips refinery in Rodeo as the most profligate disseminator of poisons in the Bay Area, releasing 504,472 pounds of toxic substances into the air, water or ground. It was the 10th biggest source of chemicals and pollutants in the state, according to (a) report released in January.
“Almost half of the violations cited by the (Bay Area Air Quality Management District) between 2011 and 2012 involved excessive short-term emissions and valve leaks on tanks.”
According to the DEIR, Section 4.1-23: An unmitigated, significant and unavoidable air quality violation, with a net increase in Nitrogen oxides and ozone precursor emissions would result from transporting crude by rail through the communities up-rail within the Sacramento Basin: in the Yolo-Solano, Sacramento Metropolitan and Placer County Air Quality Management Districts.
How can we, in good conscience — or even legally — violate the air quality of our neighbors to the north by authorizing these shipments? And not only would we affect their air quality, we also would authorize the transport of a highly toxic, corrosive, flammable material in 36, 500 tank cars, each weighing 143 tons when loaded with crude oil — an annual total of 1,460 locomotives weighing more than 7,150 tons when loaded — through these communities, over rails that were never built for and have never carried such heavy traffic, all for the sole purpose of satisfying human greed?
Valero’s net income rose 28 percent in the first quarter of 2014; net income to shareholders jumped to $828 million, while revenues rose to $33.6 billion. If you are telling me that Valero needs this project to stay competitive, you haven’t looked at the facts.
A closer look at ‘job creation,’ one of the claimed benefits to the community from crude-by-rail
The addition of 20 full-time jobs at the refinery will be the result of switching from crude by vessel to rail delivery. There will be 72 fewer vessel deliveries, in which crude is pumped directly from a ship at the dock into pipes and storage tanks in one operation. Instead, there will be 36,500 tank cars per year to be emptied at the refinery, coupling and uncoupling 100 tank cars per day.
Let’s be clear, these are HAZMAT jobs. Not only would you be unloading one of the most toxic substances on the planet, breathing in toxic “fugitive emissions” from the tank cars, you also would be in direct contact with the toxic emissions from 730 locomotives per year. The only thing appealing about these new jobs will be the “good pay” (they are never described as “good jobs”), because they are hazardous, arduous, truly nasty jobs.
Section 4.6.5 Impacts and Mitigation Measures: Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Another one of the project’s “benefits” much proclaimed by Valero is the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Valero states that crude by rail would “improve air quality in the Bay Area.” They are not lying — this is a carefully worded deception. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District is a huge area encompassing every county that touches the Bay, the entirety of every county except for Sonoma and Solano counties. This is the area in which they can legally claim to improve air quality.
The mitigating factor here is the reduced number of oil tankers traversing the Bay. What they calculated were the emissions from 72 ships that will no longer be sailing across 49.5 miles — from the sea buoy outside the Golden Gate to the Valero dock in Benicia and back out again. (That’s 99 miles total for each of the 72 tankers.) They were allowed to subtract those Bay Area emissions from the direct emissions that will be generated right here from construction of the rail terminal, the unloading of crude oil and the 730 locomotive engines moving through the Industrial Park.
This, then, gives Valero a “less than significant” increase in emissions (DEIR Table 4.1-5) — but in reality, while reducing emissions out in the Bay they will be increasing them right here where we live and breathe by 18,433 metric tons per year (DEIR Table 4.6-5). This may be legal in terms of the permitting process, and good news for sailboats on the Bay, but for the people of Benicia and especially for any businesses located in the Industrial Park, it is a terrible deal.
What people need to understand is that this “mitigation” in the “Bay Area” has been used to offset the very real pollution that will happen right here in our city. That pollution is not reduced by one particle, except on paper. To tell us that this is a “benefit” to Benicia is hugely hypocritical and a manipulation of the facts. Do not be deceived. Know that the pollution in this city will increase as a result of crude by rail, and the “mitigation” out in the Bay actually works against us. And if you have a business in the Industrial Park, you will be in the thick of it.
Further emissions and omissions
The DEIR, page 4.1-21, states: “. . . locomotives generate more emissions than marine vessels per mile, per 1,000,000 barrels of crude oil delivered each year, of ROG (reactive organic gas), NOx, (nitrogen oxide), CO (carbon monoxide), PM10 and PM25 (particulate matter of differing micron size).” Estimates are vague regarding all this pollution. We are supposed to take comfort, however, in the decrease in marine emissions from fewer oil tankers traveling from Alaska, South America and the Middle East, which according to this document is supposed to offset all but the lethal NOx from the trains. It’s fancy figuring, subtracting what is happening on the ocean blue from the reality of emissions from 1,460 locomotives, each traveling more than 1,500 miles, that would be added to the terrestrial U.S., directly to hundreds of communities, farms and forests along the railways. The impact would, in fact, be “significant and unavoidable.”
But all this is avoidable — if Benicia declares a moratorium on crude by rail.
I have a dream today . . . that could all too easily become tomorrow’s nightmare.
Sue Kibbe is a longtime resident of Benicia’s Highlands district.
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