Category Archives: Bakken Crude

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Emergency Readiness & Response, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Oil stabilization, State regulation, Volatility

National Public Radio: Fiery Oil-Train Derailments Prompt Calls For Less Flammable Oil

Repost from National Public Radio
[Editor: An excellent overview of efforts to regulate the volatility of Bakken Crude.  Audio appears first below, followed by text version.  Significant quote: “Energy economist Philip Verleger, says the resistance is about money. ‘The industry never wants to take steps which increase the cost of production, even if it’s in the best interests of everybody,’ he says. Verleger says the opposition to proposed safety rules is short-sighted, and that the industry could actually hurt itself if there’s another serious incident. ‘I think the movement of crude oil by rail is one accident away from being terminated,’ Verleger says.”  – RS]

Fiery Oil-Train Derailments Prompt Calls For Less Flammable Oil

by Emily Guerin,

A fireball goes up at the site of an oil train derailment in Casselton, N.D., in this Dec. 30 photo. The fiery crash left an ominous cloud over the town and led some residents to evacuate.
A fireball goes up at the site of an oil train derailment in Casselton, N.D., in this Dec. 30 photo. The fiery crash left an ominous cloud over the town and led some residents to evacuate. Bruce Crummy/AP

Once a day, a train carrying crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields rumbles through Bismarck, N.D., just a stone’s throw from a downtown park.

The Bakken fields produce more than 1 million barrels of oil a day, making the state the nation’s second-largest oil producer after Texas. But a dearth of pipelines means that most of that oil leaves the state by train — trains that run next to homes and through downtowns.

After several fiery accidents, oil companies are under pressure to make their oil less explosive before loading it onto rail cars. But oil companies say rules requiring those modifications will create more problems than they solve.

The trains passing through Bismarck worry Lynn Wolff, an activist with the environmental group Dakota Resource Council. “Last December we got the wake-up call,” he says. “That was the explosion and derailment of an oil train in Casselton, N.D.”

Wolff is referring to a crash in farmland just outside the small town of Casselton. No one was hurt, but the crash could have been deadly had it happened in town.

This summer, Bismarck officials ran through a simulated oil train derailment, with responders operating on the assumption that some of the town’s buildings would be devastated or destroyed, says Gary Stockert, Bismarck’s emergency manager. “We exercised with the assumption that we had over 60 or 70 casualties.”

Around the country, other cities and towns with oil train traffic are preparing for similar disasters.

In neighboring Minnesota, Gov. Mark Dayton “is concerned primarily about the safety of people along oil train routes, and in particular about the fact that this is a very volatile oil,” says Dave Christianson, an official with the Minnesota Department of Transportation.

Dayton has joined activists in asking North Dakota to force oil companies to “stabilize” the oil — to make it less explosive by separating out the flammable liquids.

Last month, North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple convened a public hearing on the idea. Keith Lilie, an operations and maintenance manager for Statoil, which has a big presence in the Bakken, testified in front of a room full of oilmen in suits and cowboy boots who came to the hearing from places like Oklahoma City and Houston.

Lilie said he opposes having to build expensive tanks to heat the oil and separate out flammable liquids, like butane.

“Statoil believes the current conditioning of crude oil is sufficient for safely transporting Bakken crude oil by truck, rail and pipeline,” he said.

Eric Bayes, general manager of Oasis Petroleum’s operations in the Bakken, also testified. He asked what companies are supposed to do with those explosive liquids once they’re separated from the oil.

The stabilization process, he says, would “create another product stream you have no infrastructure in place for.”

But energy economist Philip Verleger, says the resistance is about money. “The industry never wants to take steps which increase the cost of production, even if it’s in the best interests of everybody,” he says.

Verleger says the opposition to proposed safety rules is short-sighted, and that the industry could actually hurt itself if there’s another serious incident. “I think the movement of crude oil by rail is one accident away from being terminated,” Verleger says.

Activist Lynn Wolff supports new rules that would make the oil less explosive, and says such regulation would protect people beyond North Dakota. “These bomb trains have been in Virginia and Alabama and blown up there as well,” he says.

Federal officials in Washington are also considering ways to make oil trains safer, such as strengthening tank cars.

As for making the oil leaving the Bakken less flammable, officials in North Dakota say they’ll make a decision by the end of the year.

This story was reported with Inside Energy, a public media collaboration focusing on America’s energy issues.

Air Quality, Bakken Crude, Bridge safety, Cap-and-trade, Crude By Rail, Earthquake, Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Rail accidents, Risk Assessment, Tar sands crude

Green coalition sues Kern County over DEIR failures

Repost from Courthouse News
[Editor: Significant quote: “They claim that the EIR’s analysis of greenhouse gas emissions is ‘riddled with flaws’ because instead of discussing mitigation measures to curb emissions, it assumed that the refinery’s emissions will be ‘reduced to zero’ by participating in the state’s cap-and-trade program, and thus concluded that ‘these emissions are not significant.'”    – RS]

Greens Fight SoCal Tar Sands Oil Project

By Rebekah Kearn, October 13, 2014

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (CN) – Kern County illegally approved expansion of a local refinery that will let it transport and process 70,000 barrels of crude oil a day, environmentalists claim in court.

The Association of Irritated Residents, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club sued the Kern County Board of Supervisors and the Kern County Planning and Community Development Department, on Oct. 9 in Superior Court.

Alon U.S.A. Energy, of Texas, and its subsidiary Paramount Petroleum Corp. are named as real parties in interest.

“The lawsuit challenges Kern County’s unlawful approval of a massive oil refinery and rail project that will further harm air quality in the San Joaquin Valley and subject residents in several states to the catastrophic risks of a derailment involving scores of tanker cars filled with explosive Bakken crude oil,” plaintiffs’ attorney Elizabeth Forsyth, with Earthjustice, told Courthouse News.

Bakken crude is from northern Montana and North Dakota, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Much of it is extracted by fracking, or hydraulic fracturing.

“The San Joaquin Valley is already overburdened by industrial pollution,” Forsyth said. “Kern County officials should put the health of their residents over the profits of oil companies.”

The groups claim the county’s approval of the Alon Bakersfield Refinery Crude Oil Flexibility Project and its allegedly inadequate environmental impact report violated the California Environmental Quality Act.

The project quintuples the Alon Bakersfield Refinery’s capacity to import crude oil, “from 40 tank cars per day to 200 tank cars per day, or up to 63.1 million barrels of crude per year,” the 27-page complaint states.

“This influx of cheap, mid-continent crudes, including Canadian tar sands crude and Bakken crude from North Dakota, would allow the shuttered refinery to reopen and run at full capacity, processing 70,000 barrels of crude oil per day,” according to the complaint.

“The project’s massive ramp-up in oil transport and processing poses alarming health and safety threats to the residents of Bakersfield and to those who live along the crude-by-rail route. Restarting the refinery will significantly increase harmful air pollution that will only exacerbate the poor air quality and respiratory illnesses that plague San Joaquin Valley communities already unfairly burdened with industrial pollution.”

Bakken crude oil is “highly volatile,” and shipping it across several states “over treacherous and poorly maintained mountain passages” without adequate safety regulations will expose everyone who lives along the shipping route to the risks of derailment, the environmentalists say.

Trains carrying Bakken crude have derailed and exploded, including the July 2013 disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Canada, which killed 47 people and leveled half of downtown Lec-Mégantic, according to the complaint.

Bakersfield, pop. 464,000, between Los Angeles and Fresno, is the ninth-largest city in California. Kern County produces more oil than any other county in the state, and boasts the fourth largest agricultural output in the country.

Its air quality is abysmal. “Bakersfield has the country’s third most polluted air, according to the American Lung Association, and one in six children in the Valley will be diagnosed with asthma before age 18,” Forsyth told Courthouse News.

Kern County’s notoriously poor air quality causes approximately 1,500 premature deaths each year, and exposure to toxic air pollution racks up “$3 billion to $6 billion in health costs and lost productivity annually,” according to the complaint.

Several schools, residential neighborhoods and a hospital are only a few miles away from the Alon Bakersfield refinery. It is 1,000 feet from the Kern River Parkway, where people hike, walk, and ride bikes along trails and through parks, according to the complaint.

The refinery shut its doors in 2008 when its owner filed for bankruptcy. After sitting inactive for two years, it was bought by Alon in 2010 and “refashioned to convert intermediate vacuum gas oil into finished products,” but stopped all refining operations in December 2012 when the price of local feedstock rose, the complaint states.

In August 2012, Paramount submitted proposed modifications to the county that would let the refinery use the Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail line to bring in 5.5 million gallons of oil per day.

“The five-fold expansion of the terminal’s unloading capacity, from 40 tank cars per day to over 200 tank cars per day, is the largest crude-by-rail project in California, twice the size of the next largest project,” the complaint states.

The Kern County Board of Supervisors approved the environmental impact report on Sept. 9 this year.

But the plaintiffs claim the environmental study “obfuscates and underestimates” the significant impacts posed by the project and ignores the effects that rail transport of Bakken crude will have on air pollution.

“The EIR severely underestimates the safety risks of this project through sloppy math and an incomplete analysis,” the complaint states. “Based on simple mathematical error, the EIR calculates the risk of a train accident involving an oil spill is unlikely to occur within the project’s 30-year lifetime. Correcting this error, however, results in a risk of accident involving an oil spill once every 30 years.”

California has a high risk for catastrophic accidents because many of its 5,000 to 7,000 railroad bridges are over 100 years old and are not routinely inspected by any state or federal agency, and the rail lines run through “hazard areas” such as earthquake faults and densely populated cities, the complaint states.

Kern County is especially vulnerable because “the freight rail track runs through the Tehachapi Mountain, an area identified by the California Interagency Rail Safety Working Group as a ‘high hazard area.’ The rail track includes steep grades, extreme track curvature, and a single track through the majority of the corridor. The elevation loss of this corridor is approximately 3,600 feet from Tehachapi to Bakersfield, and the grade is so steep that it includes the famous ‘Tehachapi loop’ where the railroad line must loop back under itself to make the grade,” the complaint adds.

The plaintiffs say the project also threatens to further pollute the air quality of a region “already plagued by the worst air quality in the nation.”

“Refining Bakken crude emits high levels of volatile organic compound emissions that lead to ozone pollution, which in turn causes respiratory illnesses such as asthma,” Forsyth told Courthouse News.

“The refining of tar sands crude, which is far dirtier than local crudes, will result in higher emissions of greenhouse gases, nitrogen, sulfur and toxic metals,” she added.

Moreover, restarting the refinery and processing 60 million barrels of fossil fuels a year will elevate greenhouse gas emissions in the region and interfere with California’s goal of reducing such emissions, the groups say.

They claim the EIR’s analysis of greenhouse gas emissions is “riddled with flaws” because instead of discussing mitigation measures to curb emissions, it assumed that the refinery’s emissions will be “reduced to zero” by participating in the state’s cap-and-trade program, and thus concluded that “these emissions are not significant.”

“The EIR also unlawfully underestimates greenhouse gas emissions, ignoring emissions from the combustion of end products produced from the imported crude,” the complaint states.

After Kern County released an initial study of the project in September 2013, the Air District commented that using 2007 as the baseline to analyze impacts to air quality was improper because the refinery had not refined crude since 2008, according to the complaint.

The groups say the draft environmental report released for public comment on May 22 this year did not correct this error.

“The draft EIR also omitted fundamental information necessary to evaluate the EIR’s conclusions, including underlying assumptions and calculations for the EIR’s emissions analysis, data concerning the properties of Bakken crude, and an objective description of the project’s crude slate,” the complaint states.

On June 13, the groups’ attorneys asked for the information not included in the draft report and an extension to the 45-day comment period, but the county denied both requests.

When the county issued its final EIR in August, the groups say, they objected to “new disclosures that the public had not had a chance to review,” including its flawed analysis of the probability of a train accident, and demanded that it be revised.

Several prominent environmental scientists submitted comments criticizing the report’s treatment of toxic air emissions and its failure to include “emergency flaring events” in emissions calculations, but the county ignored their input and approved the report 13 days after it was released, the complaint states.

Kern County Counsel Theresa Goldner defended the project.

“The Kern County Board of Supervisors carefully and thoughtfully considered the EIR and all public comments and approved the report after a full and complete public process,” Goldner told Courthouse News.

“We will vigorously oppose this action.”

Paramount did not immediately return requests for comment.

The environmentalists seek declaratory judgment that Kern County violated CEQA by authorizing the refinery expansion project without performing adequate environmental analysis.

They ask that the project approvals and the environmental impact report be vacated until the defendants prepare a new environmental study that complies with CEQA.

They also want an injunction preventing the defendants from carrying out any part of the project until they fulfill all of the CEQA requirements.

They are represented by Earthjustice attorneys Elizabeth Forsyth and co-counsel Wendy Park of San Francisco.

Air Quality, Bakken Crude, California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), Crude By Rail, Environmental Impacts

Residents and environmental groups sue to stop Kern County crude oil project

Repost from The Sacramento Bee
[Editor: For details and contacts, see the press release by The Center for Biological Diversity.  Here is a link to the full complaint.  – RS]

Environmentalists sue to stop Kern County crude oil project

By Tony Bizjak, Oct. 9, 2014

A coalition of residents and environmental groups has filed a lawsuit challenging Kern County’s approval last month of what would be the largest crude-by-rail project in the state.

Kern officials unanimously gave the OK in September to the Alon USA refining company to transform a mothballed Bakersfield refinery into a combination refinery and receiving station for trains transporting crude oil from out of state.

It would be the largest crude-by-rail transfer station in California, twice the size of a similar facility being planned in the Bay Area city of Benicia by the Valero Refining Co. Potentially, the Bakersfield station could receive trains carrying flammable Bakken oil from North Dakota through Central Valley cities, including Sacramento.

The lawsuit, filed by Earthjustice, contends the county did not fully assess the project’s health risks to state residents. Those risks, Earthjustice says, include the possibility of explosions if trains derail enroute to the refinery. The lawsuit argues that the project will further degrade air quality in the San Joaquin Valley and cited the region’s high levels of pediatric asthma.

“Restarting a shuttered oil refinery is a huge step backwards for cleaning up some of the worst polluted air in the nation. This project will only exacerbate asthma and other respiratory illnesses that already plague Bakersfield residents and children at extraordinarily high rates,” said Gordon Nipp, vice chairman of the local Kern-Kaweah Chapter of the Sierra Club, which is a plaintiff in the case.

Kern County officials could not immediately be reached for comment. The county conducted what it described as a comprehensive environmental review before approving the project, and expressed confidence that the transports would be conducted safely.

Bakken Crude, Bridge safety, California Regulation, Crude By Rail, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Rail inspection, Valero Benicia Refinery

California bridge inspectors getting started – will visit only 30 of 5,000 bridges in 2015

Repost from The Sacramento Bee

Editorial: California makes progress on train safety by inspecting railroad bridges

By the Editorial Board, Oct. 9, 2014
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Emergency responders learn about the different types of railroad tank cars in a safety class last week at a CSX yard in Richmond, Va. CSX uses its “safety train” to train first responders in communities where it hauls large volumes of crude oil. Curtis Tate / McClatchy-Tribune

It’s encouraging that important steps are being taken to make sure oil trains rumbling through California don’t derail, but the job isn’t nearly done yet.

For the first time, the California Public Utilities Commission plans to check behind safety inspections by private railroad companies of rail bridges across the state, focusing on those traversed by trains carrying crude oil.

The commission is deploying two new bridge inspectors – among seven new rail inspectors hired with money allocated by Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature in response to rising concerns about more oil trains in California. The two inspectors will likely work as a team, visiting four bridges a week. They won’t be doing full inspections, but rather reviewing that the railroads’ safety checks are in proper order.

At that rate, it would take 50 years to check all 5,000 rail bridges, as The Sacramento Bee’s Tony Bizjak reported this week. That obviously isn’t fast enough.

So the commission is compiling a priority list of the first 30 bridges for visits in 2015. Here are two possible ones that should be strongly considered: the heavily used, 103-year-old I Street Bridge in downtown Sacramento and the Clear Creek Trestle in Feather River Canyon. Both are expected to be on primary routes for oil trains.

It’s also significant that state and local officials are pushing for a more complete risk assessment of Valero’s proposal to run oil trains through Northern California to its Benicia refinery.

Late last month, the utilities commission and the state Office of Spill Prevention and Response joined the Sacramento Area Council of Governments and the cities of Davis and Sacramento in raising concerns that the city of Benicia’s draft environmental impact report underestimated the potential of explosion and fire from two 50-car trains going daily through Roseville, Sacramento, West Sacramento, Davis and other cities. Attorney General Kamala Harris has jumped on the bandwagon, too.

For one thing, state officials say they want more detail on how Benicia officials came up with a projection that a train derailment would spill 100 gallons or more of oil only once every 111 years along the 69 miles of track between Roseville and Benicia.

At the same time, California’s two U.S. senators are pressing federal transportation officials to expand their requirements for railroads to notify first responders of oil shipments. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s emergency order, issued in May, covers only shipments of at least 1 million gallons (about 35 rail cars) of crude from the Bakken oil field in North Dakota.

Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein say that notification ought to be required for any quantity of Bakken, or any kind of crude oil or other flammable liquid, for that matter.

They’re right. If safety is the goal, there’s no logical reason that smaller shipments and other kinds of crude aren’t covered. The notification mandate is among proposed rules on oil trains that federal officials plan to impose by year’s end. They also include phasing out older rail cars, lower speed limits and more comprehensive response plans for spills.

Those federal regulations will become even more crucial if California’s two major railroad companies – BNSF and Union Pacific – win their federal lawsuit filed Tuesday that challenges a new state law requiring them to come up with oil spill prevention and response plans. The companies argue that federal law prevents states from imposing such safety rules.

This is often how important safety improvements get made – step by step, at different levels of government, with advocates having to keep pushing for stronger protections against industry resistance. Everyone involved should have one priority – putting public safety first and foremost.