Category Archives: Derailment

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Property values, Valero Benicia Refinery, Valero Crude By Rail

Benicia City Council member speaks out on Valero Crude by Rail

Repost from The Pioneer, Cal State East Bay

Benicia Council member Tom Campbell interviewed by Cal State University newspaper: “Transportation plan in ‘uncharted territory’”

By Kali Persall, Managing Editor, July 13, 2016
Photo by Kali Persall/The Pioneer

Benicia residents will have to wait a few more months for a final decision on the Valero refinery’s controversial proposal to transport more than two million gallons of crude oil by train into the city, daily.

The three-year-long Crude by Rail initiative is currently awaiting review by the Surface Transportation Board, an offshoot of the U.S. Department of Transportation that regulates railroad activity across the country.

The Benicia City Council, which voted 3-2 in March to allow the project to progress to the STB for a second opinion, will reconvene on September 20 to review the case again, according to Benicia City Council member Tom Campbell.

According to the proposal, which was created in 2013, approximately 70,000 barrels of Canadian tar sand and bakken crude oil from North Dakota would be brought into Benicia by 100 railroad cars on the Union Pacific Railroad every day. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that one barrel of crude oil contains 42 gallons, which can be converted to 12 gallons of diesel and 19 gallons of gasoline.

The project also includes the construction of a service road and an offloading facility, the implementation of 4,000 feet of underground pipeline and the replacement of underground infrastructure at the refinery.

Cities, counties and states are currently preempted from controlling what is transported by railroad, meaning the city of Benicia cannot look into any of the potential dangers that could occur during transportation of the crude oil. Until the oil reaches the city limits, the city has no say in that aspect of the project, explained Campbell.

According to Campbell, Valero is trying to extend the railroad’s preemption to itself by arguing that a rejection of the project — and thus the rejection of the offloading facility that would need to be built — would impede indirectly on the railroad’s economic success by directly affecting Valero’s.

This preemption clause contributed largely to the Benicia Planning Commission’s rejection of the project in February.

Dozens of community members have spoken out against the project and the potential safety hazards that a derailment or malfunction could cause. Residents are also concerned about the possibility of their property values decreasing, which happened in Richmond when a fire erupted in the Chevron Refinery in 2012.

Conversely, the project has the potential to create an estimated 120 temporary and 20 permanent jobs, according to a final Environmental Impact Report for the project. Campbell estimates that property taxes could also increase to between $150,000 and $200,000 annually.

The STB will issue a declarative statement about what is considered off-limits for the city, either in favor of Valero’s petition or against, according to Campbell.

If the board votes “yes,” to the refinery qualifying for preemption, it would take away all of the rights of the city to have any say in the project. The city would be preempted from looking at whether the plan follows zoning or building codes, explained Campbell. In theory, the railroad could build the offloading facility wherever it wanted, even in a residential neighborhood.

According to Campbell, the issue is unprecedented, far-reaching and transcends anything the city council has handled in the past.

A declaration in favor of Valero’s petition would be “pushing the envelope further than it has ever gone before” and venturing into “uncharted territory,” stated Campbell. If this happened, the case would be escalated to the federal court system.

“I don’t think the STB is going to go anywhere near that, but there’s no telling,” said Campbell. “If they were to go down that route and decide something that extreme, which would have an effect on every city, county and state that has a railroad going through it.”

If the board issues a “no” declaration, Campbell said the city council’s vote depends solely on the aspects of the project that directly concern the city, such as the construction of the offloading dock.

Campbell believes the board will not reach a decision before September.

Valero Public Affairs Manager Sue Fisher Jones was unable to provide any additional details on the refinery’s next plan of action at the time of publication.

Crude By Rail, Derailment, Ethanol, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), National Transportation Safety Board, Tank car design, Tank car maintenance, Tank car retirement, Tank car retrofit, U.S. Department of Transportation

NY TIMES / AP: Slow Progress Seen on Faulty Rail Cars

Repost from the New York Times (AP)

Upgrades to Unsafe Tank Cars Could Take 15 Years, Board Says

By Matthew Brown, Associated Press, July 13, 2016, 2:30 A.M. E.D.T.
Oil Train Accidents
FILE–In this June 3, 2016, file frame from video provided by KGW-TV, smoke billows from a Union Pacific train that derailed near Mosier, Ore., in the scenic Columbia River Gorge. U.S. safety officials say they’ve seen slow progress in efforts to upgrade or replace tens of thousands of rupture-prone rail cars used to transport oil and ethanol, despite a string of fiery derailments. (KGW-TV via AP, file)

BILLINGS, Mont. — Accident-prone tank cars used to haul crude oil and ethanol by rail could remain in service for another 15 years under federal rules that allow companies to phase in upgrades to the aging fleet, according to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.

Transportation officials and railroad representatives have touted the rules as a key piece of their efforts to stave off future disasters, following a string of fiery derailments and major spills that raised concerns about the crude-by-rail industry.

Yet without mandatory, periodic benchmarks for meeting the requirements, the decision to upgrade to safer tank car designs “is left entirely to tank car fleet owners, and may be driven by market factor influences, not safety improvements,” NTSB Chairman Christopher Hart said in a letter Tuesday to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

Tom Simpson with the Railway Supply Institute, which represents tank car manufacturers and owners, said the industry is committed to putting stronger cars in place. Members of the group will meet deadlines for replacing or upgrading the cars, he said, noting that demand for rail cars has eased after crude-by-rail shipments decreased over the past two years in response to lower oil prices.

“The need to modify or install new cars isn’t as urgent as when the rule was issued,” Simpson said.

In recent years, accidents involving the older cars have occurred in Oregon, Montana, North Dakota, Illinois, West Virginia and Canada.

The most notable was in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, where 47 people were killed when a runaway oil train derailed in 2013. During the most recent accident last month in Oregon, 42,000 gallons of crude oil spilled, sparking a massive fire that burned for 14 hours near the small town of Mosier in the Columbia River Gorge.

Cars built before the rule was enacted do not have to be fully replaced until 2029, although most would have to come off the tracks sooner.

Just over 10,300 stronger tank cars mandated by the new rules are available for service, according to figures obtained by The Associated Press from the Association of American Railroads.

That’s equivalent to roughly 20 percent of the 51,500 tank cars used to haul crude and ethanol during the first quarter of 2016.

Transportation Department Press Secretary Clark Pettig said in response to the NTSB’s criticism that the schedule to retrofit older cars was locked in by Congress in a transportation bill approved last year. The Congressional deadline represents “the absolute last moment” to meet the new standards, Pettig said.

“We agree with NTSB that industry should work to beat those deadlines,” he said.

A Wednesday meeting was planned in Washington, D.C., where government and industry officials were set to update the safety board on progress addressing the issue.

Safety board member Robert Sumwalt told the Associated Press that federal regulators need to set milestones to hold the industry accountable.

“There’s been 28 accidents over the past 10 years. That’s almost three accidents a year,” Sumwalt said. “Unfortunately, history shows we probably will have more accidents involving flammable liquids.”

A bill from U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and other Democratic lawmakers would offer tax credits for companies that upgrade their cars during the next several years.

“Communities near train tracks, like Mosier, Oregon, must be confident that companies are using the safest tank cars possible,” Wyden said.

The railroad association said only 700 of the least resilient model of the older-style tank cars remain in service. Most of the cars in current use have at least some improvements, such as shields at either end of the car to help prevent punctures during derailments.

Transportation officials cautioned, however, that thousands of idled “legacy cars” could quickly come back online if oil prices rise and shipment volumes rebound.

Most tank cars are owned or leased by companies that ship fuel by rail, not the railroads themselves.

“Every tank car carrying crude or ethanol needs to be upgraded or replaced,” said railroad association spokesman Ed Greenberg.

Canadian regulation, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Oil Industry, Oil industry lobby, Train length, Train speed, Train weight

Are Oil Trains Just Too Heavy? No Regulations, No Weigh To Know

Repost from DeSmogBlog
[Editor: Apologies for the ad content. My retired volunteer budget won’t allow the $5 per DeSmog article for no ads.  🙁   – RS]

Are Oil Trains Just Too Heavy? No Regulations, No Weigh To Know

The cause of the most recent bomb train derailment and fire in Mosier, OR has been determined to be lag bolts that had sheared off resulting in the derailment. This once again raises concerns that the unit trains of oil are putting too much stress on the tracks due to their excessive weight and length. There… Continue reading Are Oil Trains Just Too Heavy? No Regulations, No Weigh To Know →

Bakken Crude, CPC-1232 standard, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Tank car design, Tank car puncture velocity, Tar sands crude, Volatile gases

Railway Age editor blasts industry, regulators for failure to understand root cause of derailments: volatile gases

Repost from Railway Age
[Editor: I will take issue with the author, who discounts tank car design, track maintenance and other factors for continuing catastrophic oil train derailments.  But I applaud his highlighting of the importance of reducing volatile gases in crude oil at the source.  See an important related discussion on the difference between conditioning and stabilizing the oil.  – RS]

The positive legacy of Lac-Mégantic: Zero

By David Thomas, Contributing Editor, Friday, July 08, 2016

Three years ago, in the early hours of July 13, a runaway oil train exploded in the then-idyllic lakeside town of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing 47 people.

The investigation and ensuing cascade of regulatory measures severely disrupted the nascent crude-by-rail industry, caused federal authorities in Canada and the U.S. to condemn most of the continental tank car fleet, and turned the chattering classes against the railroads, amid a ruthless tarring by the petroleum lobby, for not “keeping the damn trains on the track.”

Lac megantic burningAfter all that, crude oil trains continue to derail and blow up; and the official blaming continues to target the railroads. The Federal Railroad Administration’s preliminary report on the July 3 explosion of four cars in Mosier, Ore., blames Union Pacific, citing sheared lag bolts and loose tieplates as the cause of the derailment.

As a trivial, background factoid, the FRA noted that the Mosier crude originated at Dakota Plains’ New Town terminal in North Dakota. The FRA did not mention that the doomed Lac-Mégantic train was loaded at that very same terminal, with crude oil fracked from the same Bakken oil formation.

Despite all of the regulatory agonizing, oil train explosions remain a clear and present danger, and not because of tieplates or tank cars.

The FRA reported that the four breached and burned cars were modern CPC-1232s, upgraded with full-height head shields and insulated metal jackets. Such upgraded cars are approved for use by the FRA, which remarked in its report: “The tank cars involved in the derailment performed as expected in the incident based on tank car performance metrics.”

In other words, the new tank cars are expected to breach in a 25 mph derailment. In more other words, the entire mandated fleet renewal was a monster red herring that distracted attention from fixing the root cause of exploding oil trains: contaminated crude oil containing dangerous and entirely unnecessary concentrations of explosive gases.

The solution, by now, is achingly obvious. Volatile crude should be heat-treated to remove explosive and corrosive gases (as is done routinely in Texas). Alberta bitumen should neither be diluted with naptha to ease its flow into and out of tank cars, nor juiced with hydrogen to boost its otherwise dismal energy value.

None of those measures has been implemented by Canada or the U.S. Instead, the obvious factor of crude oil volatility in oil train explosions has been shunted off to the U.S. Department of Energy for years of study that will eventually prove the validity of high school chemistry. The unnecessary presence of propane, butane, naptha and hydrogen converts barely flammable crude oil into a volatile explosive.

Losers:

• The honor of rail and hazmat regulators and elected politicians in Canada and the U.S., for their utter failure to address the known root cause of oil train explosions.

• The railroads, for allowing themselves to be painted as perpetrators of oil train explosions, instead of victims, forced by law, to haul demonstrably unsafe cargo in inadequate conveyances.

• Three lowly railroad operating employees facing criminal charges for the consequences of following company rules against setting automatic train brakes on a train, left unattended, with the engine running on a downhill grade.

• The sanctity of human life, for losing out to profit margin in the cost-benefit analysis of shipping incidentally (or in the case of bitumen, intentionally) contaminated crude.

Winners:

• The American Petroleum Institute, for convincing its well-paid legion of political hacks to blame tank cars and track bolts, instead of weaponized crude oil.

• Current and former Transport Canada executives, who escaped public identification and accountability for the still-unexplained exemption of a decrepit railroad from crewing requirements that apply to other railroads.

• Canada’s Transportation Safety Board, for continuing to survive as an investigative body, while defending its continuing failure to recommend that automatic train brakes be set when parking an unattended hazmat consist on a downhill grade—even when its Lac-Mégantic investigation concluded that setting such brakes would, very probably, have prevented the catastrophe.

Lac-Mégantic’s 47 victims died in the cause of maximized oil industry profit. Their deaths are unavenged. Those responsible go unpunished. The probability of future, entirely avoidable oil train calamities approaches the inevitable.

And that, three years later, is the legacy of Lac-Mégantic.