Category Archives: Crude By Rail

CPC-1232, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Diluted bitumen (Dilbit), DOT-111, Evacuation, Explosion, Fire, Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Tar sands crude

INSURANCE JOURNAL: Derailed Train in West Virginia Had Safer Tank Cars

Repost from Insurance Journal

Derailed Train in West Virginia Had Safer Tank Cars

By John Raby and Jonathan Mattise | February 26, 2015 

The fiery derailment of a train carrying crude oil in West Virginia earlier this month is one of three in the past year involving tank cars that already meet a higher safety standard than what federal law requires – leading some to suggest even tougher requirements that industry representatives say would be costly.

Hundreds of families were evacuated and nearby water treatment plants were temporarily shut down after cars derailed from a train carrying 3 million gallons of North Dakota crude on Feb. 16, shooting fireballs into the sky, leaking oil into a Kanawha River tributary and burning down a house nearby. It was snowing at the time, but it is not yet clear if weather was a factor.

The train’s tanks were a newer model – the 1232 –designed during safety upgrades voluntarily adopted by the industry four years ago. The same model spilled oil and caught fire in Timmins, Ontario this month, and last year in Lynchburg, Virginia.

A series of ruptures and fires have prompted the administration of President Barack Obama to consider requiring upgrades such as thicker tanks, shields to prevent tankers from crumpling, rollover protections and electronic brakes that could make cars stop simultaneously, rather than slam into each other.

If approved, increased safety requirements now under White House review would phase out tens of thousands of older tank cars being used to carry highly flammable liquids.

“This accident is another reminder of the need to improve the safety of transporting hazardous materials by rail,” said Christopher Hart, acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Oil industry officials had been opposed to further upgrading the 1232 cars because of costs. But late last year they changed their position and joined with the railway industry to support some upgrades, although they asked for time to make the improvements.

According to the Association of American Railroads, oil shipments by rail jumped from 9,500 carloads in 2008 to 500,000 in 2014, driven by a boom in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota and Montana, where pipeline limitations force 70 percent of the crude to move by rail.

The downside: trains hauling Bakken-region oil have been involved in major accidents in Virginia, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Alabama and Canada, where 47 people were killed by an explosive derailment in 2013 in Lac-Megantic, Quebec.

Reports of leaks and other oil releases from tank cars are up as well, from 12 in 2008 to 186 last year, according to Department of Transportation records reviewed by The Associated Press.

Just two days before the West Virginia wreck, 29 cars of a 100-car Canadian National Railway train carrying diluted bitumen crude derailed in a remote area 50 miles south of Timmins, Ontario, spilling oil and catching fire. That train was headed from Alberta to Eastern Canada.

The train that derailed in West Virginia was bound for an oil shipping depot in Yorktown, Virginia, along the same route where three tanker cars plunged into the James River in Lynchburg, Virginia, prompting an evacuation last year.

The train derailed near unincorporated Mount Carbon just after passing through Montgomery, a town of 1,946, on a stretch where the rails wind past businesses and homes crowded between the water and the steep, tree-covered hills. All but two of the train’s 109 cars were tank cars, and 26 of them left the tracks.

Fire crews had little choice but to let the tanks burn themselves out. Each carried up to 30,000 gallons of crude.

One person – the owner of the destroyed home – was treated for smoke inhalation, but no other injuries were reported, according to the train company, CSX. The two-person crew, an engineer and conductor, managed to decouple the train’s engines from the wreck behind it and walk away unharmed.

The NTSB said its investigators will compare this wreck to others including Lynchburg and one near Casselton, N.D., when a Bakken crude train created a huge fireball that forced the evacuation of the farming town.

No cause has been determined, said CSX regional vice president Randy Cheetham. He said the tracks had been inspected just three days before the wreck.

“They’ll look at train handling, look at the track, look at the cars. But until they get in there and do their investigation, it’s unwise to do any type of speculation,” he said.

State officials do have some say over rail safety.

Railroads are required by federal order to tell state emergency officials where trains carrying Bakken crude are traveling. CSX and other railroads called this information proprietary, but more than 20 states rejected the industry’s argument, informing the public as well as first-responders about the crude moving through their communities.

West Virginia is among those keeping it secret. State officials responded to an AP Freedom of Information request by releasing documents redacted to remove nearly every detail.

There are no plans to reconsider after this latest derailment, said Melissa Cross, a program manager for the West Virginia Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

___

Contributors include Joan Lowy in Washington, D.C.; Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana; and Pam Ramsey in Charleston, West Virginia. Mattise reported from Charleston.
CPC-1232, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Diluted bitumen (Dilbit), DOT-111, DOT-117, Fire, Flash point, Tar sands crude

RAILWAY AGE: Why tar sands train became a fireball – bitumen isn’t necessarily safer than Bakken

Repost from Railway Age
[Editor: Significant quote: “This blend of bitumen and petroleum-based diluents, known as “dilbit,” has a low flash point. Thus, the widespread belief that bitumen from Alberta’s northern oil sands is far safer to transport by rail than Bakken crude is, for all intents and purposes, dead wrong. This may be disruptive news for bitumen shippers, carriers, and regulators.”  – RS]

Why bitumen isn’t necessarily safer than Bakken

By  David Thomas, Contributing Editor, February 23, 2015 
Feb. 14, 2015 CN oil train derailment near Gogama, Ontario
Feb. 14, 2015 CN oil train derailment near Gogama, Ontario. CBC News/Dillon Daveikis

The chain reaction fireballs that attended the Feb. 16, 2015 derailment of a CSX unit oil train in populated West Virginia probably blinded observers to the significance of the concurrent derailment and explosions of a CN oil train in a remote and uninhabited area of northern Ontario. Most reports treated the two events as equals, given that both trains consisted of recently manufactured CPC-1232 tank cars loaded with crude oil.

CN’s Ontario conflagration is the more disturbing of the two mishaps: The railroad reported that its train was not carrying the extra-light Bakken crude that, in a series of high-energy derailments since 2013, has proved to be explosive. To the contrary, the CN train was laden with bitumen, the extra-heavy tarry substance extracted from Alberta’s oil sands. Bitumen, in its natural highly viscous form, is considered to be essentially inflammable by petrochemical experts and is rarely considered in safety evaluations of crude by rail.

So why did the bitumen ignite and explode in Ontario’s -40ºC (-40ºF) weather? The reason, based on research consulted by Railway Age, is that the diluent added to make bitumen flow into and out of tank cars makes the blended lading quite volatile.

This blend of bitumen and petroleum-based diluents, known as “dilbit,” has a low flash point. Thus, the widespread belief that bitumen from Alberta’s northern oil sands is far safer to transport by rail than Bakken crude is, for all intents and purposes, dead wrong. This may be disruptive news for bitumen shippers, carriers, and regulators.

The hope for Bakken crude is that it can be treated to remove benzene and other “light end” substances before loading, rendering it mildly flammable instead of highly explosive. The same is not true for dilbit, because the highly volatile diluents are added to the crude to make it less viscous. A safer procedure is to heat bitumen at origin before loading into a tank car and again at destination, prior to unloading. Some tank cars are equipped with internal steam coils for this purpose and are used in crude oil service, but a requirement for such heating elements is not included in the specifications proposed for a future DOT-117 tank car to replace both the DOT-111 and CPC-1232 cars now in CBR service.

According to “Properties of Dilbit and Conventional Crude Oils,” a February 2014 report by the Alberta Innovates consortium of industry, government, and university researchers, “[T]he flash point of fresh dilbit is initially lower than other oil types and is comparable to a diluent.” It says that dilbit will ignite upon exposure to an ignition source at -35ºC, compared to -9ºC for conventional light oil. The flash point of raw diluent is -35ºC or less. The flash point of undiluted bitumen is +151ºC, well above the +60ºC flammability threshold specified in current hazardous materials classification regulations.

The reason for the low flash point of dilbit is that ignitability is determined by a blend’s most volatile components, in this case, the diluent itself: “[T]he flash point is determined by the lowest-boil-point components (volatiles). Consequently, the flash point of the dilbit is governed by the 20%-30% volume diluent component . . . .”

The study defines flash point as “the temperature to which the fuel must be heated in order to produce an adequate fuel/air concentration to be ignited when exposed to an open flame. The flash point of the crude oil is used as an index of fire hazard in North America.”

Thus, flash point is the critical factor in determining whether a tank car breach will lead to its contents burning or exploding upon exposure to the pyrotechnics of a high-energy derailment.

Canada’s Transportation Safety Board can be expected to analyze the dilbit lading of CN’s Ontario accident, as it did the Bakken crude that exploded at Lac-Mégantic in 2013. TSB reported then that Bakken crude is more volatile than other varieties. Should TSB conclude that dilbit has a volatility similar to Bakken crude, as the Alberta research suggests, the hazmat classification of crude oil could be in question.

Bakken Crude, CPC-1232, Crude By Rail, Derailment, DOT-111, Explosion, Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Tank car design, Tank car retrofit, Valero Benicia Refinery, Valero Crude By Rail

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE EDITORIAL: Get rid of exploding tank cars

Repost from The San Francisco Chronicle
[Editor: Significant quote: “Valero Energy Co. has agreed to haul Bakken crude to its Benicia bayside refinery in the newer CPC-1232 cars as part of its city permit application to revamp its facilities to receive crude by rail rather than via oceangoing tanker. But that promise now appears inadequate to protect the safety of those in Benicia as well as in other communities — Roseville, Sacramento, Davis — along the rail line.”  (emphasis added)  – RS]

Get rid of exploding tank cars

EDITORIAL On Crude by Rail, Monday, February 23, 2015
Absent new regulations, U.S. transportation experts predict more oil train wrecks like this one, which occurred Feb. 17 in Mount Carbon, W.Va. | Steven Wayne Rotsch / Associated Press

When a train carrying crude oil derailed last week in West Virginia, sending up a fireball that burned for five days, communities on rail lines in California noted that the accident involved the newer — and it was hoped safer — CPC-1232 model tank cars. Some 3 million gallons of Bakken crude spilled from 26 cracked cars into a Kanawha River tributary, endangering water supplies and forcing the evacuation of two towns. The smoldering crude burned a home, but thankfully no one was killed.

Two days before the West Virginia train wreck, a train pulling CPC-1232 tank cars derailed and caught fire in Ontario, Canada. There was a similar accident last year in Lynchburg, Va.

Clearly, it will take tank car safety upgrades more extensive than those adopted voluntarily by the rail industry four years ago to assure the public safety and protect the environment of communities crossed by rail lines. Yet authorities have dithered.

Bakken crude, a light crude with a low sulfur content, is highly flammable, by the Department of Transportation’s own account. The shippers are working on new procedures to strip out highly volatile elements before the crude is loaded, but they are not uniformly required.

The Obama administration is considering more extensive safety upgrades such as rollover protection, sturdier hulls, shields to prevent tank rupture or collapse, and electronic brakes that would stop the cars before they slam into each other. But it is taking too long to adopt new federal rules. The oil and rail industries support some upgrades, but want more time to accomplish them. This is unacceptable.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has been working on the rules since 2012 but does not expect adoption until mid-May. Once the new rules are accepted, the industry would have three to four years to phase out the unsafe DOT-111 model tank cars, which the National Transportation Safety Board has warned are not suitable to transport flammable liquids. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of the faulty DOT-111 tank cars remain on the rails. Canadian rail authorities accelerated their phaseout of the cars after a fire set off by a derailed oil train killed 47 people in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in July 2013.

Safety upgrades are lagging the rapid increase in oil moving by rail: Shipments have increased from 9,500 car loads in 2008 to 500,000 car loads in 2014, driven by the boom in the Bakken Oil Shale formation in North Dakota, where there are few oil pipelines and 70 percent of the petroleum is shipped by train.

Valero Energy Co. has agreed to haul Bakken crude to its Benicia bayside refinery in the newer CPC-1232 cars as part of its city permit application to revamp its facilities to receive crude by rail rather than via oceangoing tanker. But that promise now appears inadequate to protect the safety of those in Benicia as well as in other communities — Roseville, Sacramento, Davis — along the rail line.

The government and the oil and rail industries will need to move more quickly to adopt new safety rules before communities along the rail lines can welcome oil trains rolling into town.

Crude By Rail

Message to World Leaders: Stop Funding Fossils

From an email sent by Oil Change International

Message to World Leaders: Stop Funding Fossils

February 23, 2015


Send your message to world leaders.

Friends,

Only two months in, 2015 has already been a busy year for the climate. The new Congress has continued its obsession with Keystone XL, oil trains have exploded around the continent, Shell announced plans to double down in the Arctic, and extreme weather has plagued the country.

But there’s something happening at the end of the year that’s worth talking about now: the UN climate summit to be held in Paris. Governments will be coming together once again to try and hammer out a global climate deal. But if there’s one lesson we’ve learned since the last try, it’s this: until we Stop Funding Fossils, we’ll never break our addiction to fossil fuels.

Send your message to global leaders calling on them to immediately eliminate the most egregious of fossil fuel subsidies: exploration subsidies.

A few months back, we released a report showing that the richest governments in the world are giving $88 billion EVERY YEAR to companies looking for more oil, gas, and coal we can’t afford to burn — and the US is at the head of the pack. We call these handouts exploration subsidies.

Exploration subsidies are the dirtiest example of our government budgets being completely out of touch with reality. While the science keeps getting more dire, Big Oil is hard at work looking for even more oil and gas reserves — and our governments are giving them billions in public money to explore for those new reserves.

Tell our leaders to say NO to exploration subsidies today.

I recently attended the first round of UN prep talks to be held through the year ahead of the Paris summit. While I was there I spoke to countless country delegates about fossil fuel subsidies. I was often met with the same refrain: “Yes, fossil fuel subsidies are an important issue.” But what I didn’t hear was any urgency to actually do something about it.

What that says to me is that we need to build a massive crescendo of voices calling for an end to these subsidies. We need to be loud, and demand action NOW. Send your message here.

In the next few months the groundwork for a potential deal in Paris will be finalized and we want to make sure it includes an end to subsidies — starting with the worst of all, exploration subsidies. As we move towards Paris, we’ll be working to raise noise about global fossil fuel subsidies, and we’ll keep you informed.

The first step is to raise your voice with us.

-David Turnbull
Campaigns Director
Oil Change International