Repost from Reuters [Editor: Reference below is to an important new Energy Department study on the volatility of Bakken crude. – RS]
North Dakota’s new oil train safety checks seen missing risks
By Patrick Rucker, Mar 31, 2015 4:14pm EDT
WASHINGTON, March 31 (Reuters) – New regulations to cap vapor pressure of North Dakota crude fail to account for how it behaves in transit, according to industry experts, raising doubts about whether the state’s much-anticipated rules will make oil train shipments safer.
High vapor pressure has been identified as a possible factor in the fireball explosions witnessed after oil train derailments in Illinois and West Virginia in recent weeks.
For over a year, federal officials have warned that crude from North Dakota’s Bakken shale oilfields contains a cocktail of explosive gas – known in the industry as ‘light ends.’
The new rules, which take effect on April 1, aim to contain dangers by spot-checking the vapor pressure of crude before loading and capping it at 13.7 pounds per square inch (psi) – about normal atmospheric conditions.
The plan relies on a widely-used test for measuring pressure at the wellhead, but safety experts say gas levels can climb inside the nearly-full tankers, so the checks are a poor indicator of explosion risks for rail shipments.
It is “well-understood, basic physics” that crude oil will exert more pressure in a full container than in the test conditions North Dakota will use, said Dennis Sutton, executive director of the Crude Oil Quality Association, which studies how to safely handle fossil fuels.
Ametek Inc, a leading manufacturer of testing equipment, has detected vapor pressure climbing from about 9 psi to over 30 psi – more than twice the new limit – while an oil tank is filled to near-capacity.
About 70 percent of the roughly 1.2 million barrels of oil produced in North Dakota every day moves by rail to distant refineries and passes through hundreds of cities and towns along the way.
The state controls matter to those communities because there is no federal standard to curb explosive gases in oil trains.
North Dakota officials point out that the pressure limit is more stringent than the industry-accepted definition of “stable” crude oil. They also say that they lack jurisdiction over tank cars leaving the state and that the pressure tests are just one of the measures to make oil trains safer.
“We’re trying to achieve a set of operating practices that generates a safe, reliable crude oil,” Lynn Helms, director of the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources, has said. Helms has also said that test readings for near-full containers were less reliable.
However, given different testing and transport conditions, industry officials say the pressure threshold may need to be lowered to reduce the risks.
Limiting vapor pressure to 13.7 psi in transit would require an operator to bring it to “something well below that” at the loading point, Sutton said.
The uncertainty about regulatory reach and safety has spurred calls for the White House to develop national standards to control explosive gas pressure.
“Let me be really clear,” Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington state told reporters last week. “They should set a standard on volatility.”
The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent safety agency, has already encouraged a federal standard for “setting vapor pressure thresholds” for oil trains citing Canadian findings linking such pressure and the size of explosions in train accidents.
Meanwhile, a leading voice for the oil industry is lobbying Congress to resist federal vapor pressure benchmarks.
Last week, the American Petroleum Institute urged lawmakers to oppose “a national volatility standard” and pointed to an Energy Department study that the severity of an oil train mishap may have more to do with the circumstances of the crash than the volatility of the cargo.
That same report said much more study was needed to understand volatility of crude oil from the Bakken. (For a link to the study: tinyurl.com/nvjqmxt)
The oil industry has said that wringing ‘light ends’ out of Bakken crude may keep a share of valuable fuel from reaching refineries.
Reuters reported early this month that Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx took his concerns about Bakken oil volatility to the White House last summer and sought advice on what to do about the danger of explosive gases.
The administration decided that rather than assert federal authority it would allow the North Dakota rules to take root, according to sources familiar with the meeting.
(Reporting By Patrick Rucker; Additional reporting by Ernest Scheyder in North Dakota; Editing by Tomasz Janowski, Bernard Orr)
Repost from New American Journal [Editor: This is a telling tale of local governance confronting – or not confronting – difficult issues, and serves as instructional material for others who take up local advocacy. Good graphics. – RS]
Tank Farm Harvest Plans in Mobile — Crude Oil Is the Crop — But What Gets Plowed Under?
By David Underhill, March 31, 2015
Tank farm city, with more scheduled: Glynn Wilson
MOBILE, Ala. – The tank farms became a hot potato, singeing any official who touched them.
Residents near sites for new or expanding tank farms fired complaints at the city’s planning commission, which readily tossed the heated hassle to the city council. A majority poised to pass a moratorium on construction of tank farms, until promoters of these projects maneuvered to whittle away that majority.
That spawned a citizens’ committee to study the issue and make recommendations to the planning commission, which appointed a subcommittee to receive these recommendations. That subcommittee is now juggling the spud before lobbing it back to the full planning commission, which will fling it again to the city council, which will … who knows.
Last week the subcommittee’s three members met to ponder. Joining them were the planning commission’s lawyer and head staffer. Although this happened in public it wasn’t a public meeting. Citizens could sit and listen but not participate.
The audience sorted themselves, as usual, into factions: the tank farm evangelists in one clump and the unbelievers in another. There were few, if any, neutral observers.
Discussion began with the easy issues: Does the city have satisfactory procedures for deciding whether and where to locate tanks holding hazardous materials? How should the public be informed about impending decisions on these matters? Should the concerns of nearby residents have a prominent role in the proceedings? Can noxious fumes be captured rather than released from tank farms? Must the operators of such facilities provide timely, accurate information to fire departments and other emergency services about dangerous substances on hand?
All agreed that any deficiencies in such issues could be fixed by adjustments to current practices.
Consensus By Garble
Then came the hard part. It was the same item that had flustered the citizens’ committee, which tried to achieve consensus about its recommendations — and largely succeeded — with one contentious exception.
Buffer zones: How broad a safety strip should separate tank farms from homes, schools, churches, hospitals, businesses? The wider the strip the less danger if something goes explosively wrong. But the wider the strip the less land remains for the tanks.
Most of the proposed new and expanding tank farms are squeezed between the waterfront and commercial or residential districts. Broad buffer zones would leave so little land for tanks along the shore that the planned facilities must shrink drastically, perhaps to the vanishing point.
This applies in the north Mobile neighborhood of Africatown, settled by the human cargo from the last slave ship to arrive in the U.S. The huge tank farm intended there would squat between the waterfront and a dense residential area.
Some on the citizens’ committee wanted a setback half a mile wide to protect Africatown. Others, more attuned to industry’s wishes, wanted a lot less.
This conflict strained the quest for consensus and garbled the passages about buffer zones in the committee’s final report. Now the same wrangle vexes the planning commission’s subcommittee and it too has found no easy solution, as the discussion at last week’s meeting revealed.
Consensus By Punting
Nobody on the subcommittee wanted to specify a number for the width of buffer zones. They said projects would differ by location and each should be considered on its own merits. Maybe, they suggested, a minimum width could be required with an option for wider setbacks where warranted by circumstances.
But they shied from saying what that minimum should be. Instead they instructed the staff to produce maps showing the sectors of the city zoned for heavy industry — where tank farms might locate — with surrounding buffers in 500 foot increments. These maps will illustrate where the desires of tank farm developers collide with people living and working within 500, 1,000 or 1,500 feet (and maybe more increments).
And the subcommittee speculated about stretching the buffers with words. Must the setback be measured from the boundary of a tank farm site to the boundary of a nearby residential zone? Or might it be measured from the porch of the nearest inhabited home to the position of the tanks within the site. Then the necessary buffer could be created by moving the tanks to the farthest part of the site and putting offices and other support facilities in the part closest to residences.
The maps will not say what the width of a buffer ought to be or where it should be measured from. The subcommittee will have to decide this and they are not ready to do so. They will meet again next month to study the maps. And they instructed their attorney to draft a prospective report to the full planning commission about any changes their deliberations may require in the city’s zoning or other regulations.
Consensus By Omission
This was a deft juggling of the hot potato. But the subcommittee didn’t dare to even touch the truly searing produce.
They recognized that approving tank farms implies approving the transport of substances to fill those tanks. In Mobile that means trains pulling long, hazardous chains of tanker cars brimming with crude oil. Subcommittee members remarked upon fiery accidents elsewhere by such trains (opponents call them bomb trains and the neighborhoods along their routes blast zones) and fretted about repeats here. But the subcommittee pleaded impotence. They said railroads are regulated by others, who have the responsibility to oversee safety.
But the trains wouldn’t be coming to town without tank farms to receive their cargoes. And the subcommittee, as a branch of the planning commission, does have a say in whether these tank farms exist. Yet the members were hesitant about linking tank farm decisions to dangers from trains.
They have the legal authority to attend to the health and safety of the people. But they acted like their main responsibility is fostering economic development. And they said repeatedly, in various phrasings, that expanding waterfront tank farms equals economic development.
To them, anybody prepared to invest any big wad of money in anything is welcome. They didn’t consider (not out loud, at least) the elementary idea that devoting the waterfront to tank farms prevents other uses of the shoreline that might be more desirable development.
While subcommittee members did note risks from tank farms, they said repeatedly that a balance must be found between economic development and public safety. This might be a valid approach if the benefits and hazards of tank farms were spread evenly across the city. But they are not. The hazards are highly concentrated in certain neighborhoods, and the benefits go mainly to investors elsewhere collecting profits. This is an inherent imbalance.
And if the benefits and hazards were distributed evenly across the community that still doesn’t assure a balance between development and safety. Weighing such a balance assumes that pluses and minuses can be calculated like a mathematical formula and a solution found. But what if circumstances make this impossible? Then the choice isn’t to have both development and safety — it’s one or the other.
Massively deadly chemical (Bhopal, India) and nuclear (Chernobyl, Ukraine; Fukushima, Japan) accidents left ruins surrounded by evacuated wastelands. Nothing comparable has happened yet with petroleum but a couple years ago in Canada an oil tanker train derailed and burned the center of a town (Lac-Megantic, Quebec) to cinders. Scores of residents died. The plans being made for oil storage and transport in Mobile contain the potential for similar or worse disasters. How could that balance development and safety?
The subcommittee made no attempt to balance economic development against the greatest environmental hazard. It was simply ignored. The city already has a throng of large petrochemical storage tanks and the planned expansions would add dozens. Most of these are near the waterfront just a few feet above sea level. The battering waves of a major hurricane could come ashore on a storm surge 20-30 feet deep. And they would bring chunks of debris serving as piercing projectiles.
Loose the contents from just a few of these tanks and the Exxon Valdez and BP’s offshore oil well become footnotes. The story history books will tell is the fate of Mobile’s river and bay.
Is such a catastrophe unlikely? Yes. Is it possible? Yes. Planners need to take this into account. The subcommittee didn’t address it in the slightest.
An Offer They Can’t Refuse?
Another awkward topic ignored was the temptation to evict. Although the subcommittee spoke openly about fashioning buffers by backing dangerous tanks away from the boundaries of industrial zones abutting residential ones, they did not mention the obvious prospect of doing the opposite.
This discussion pertained specifically to Africatown, where a giant tank farm wants to arise across the street from homes. Creating a broad buffer there by pushing the tanks back from the street and toward the water might leave so little land available for tanks that the project dies.
But if the houses are removed then the buffer would be created on the other side of the street, and the tanks could fill the whole industrial tract as originally designed. While the residents might be defiant about clinging to their ancestral homes, what happens when they begin receiving pressure to leave plus attractive prices for selling out?
This would amount to eviction, achieved by financial means. Or legal means might be used. A state’s power of eminent domain has been expanding. Previously the government could compel the sale of private property only for plainly public uses, like highways and parks. Lately private developments like shopping centers and pipelines have been declared public enough for the land they need to be seized under eminent domain. Why couldn’t that reasoning apply to homes located where a tank farm needs a buffer zone?
My Brother’s Keeper?
The tanker trains arriving in Mobile come on the Canadian National railroad from the tar sands mining moonscape of Alberta province. But extensive tar sands strata underlie north Alabama. Prospectors are taking technical and regulatory steps toward extracting these deposits.
Activists in Mobile assume the motive behind much of the urge for expanding tank farms is to hold tar sands coming by train from upstate for transfer into ships. In that case, local officials who allow tank farm expansion are also allowing large swaths of the mining region to be gouged and polluted — because those tar sands won’t be mined unless the output can get to market by boat.
If the planning commission’s subcommittee cared about this they should have said so. They didn’t. Their decisions will influence whether north Alabama becomes a replica of wrecked Alberta. But they behaved like they care about nothing except the benefits or detriments inside the Mobile city limits.
In this loudly Christian area their attitude was: Hell, no! I’m not my brother’s keeper. Eff them. I’m looking out for me.
This myopia is especially astonishing in a port that will drown when the oceans rise. Continuing to dump annual megatons of greenhouse gasses into the air by burning fossil fuels will melt the polar ice and flood every seafront.
Even if all the tank farms anticipated here are built, Mobile’s contribution to this tonnage will be trivial. Every separate place’s will be trivial.
Just as during World War II in the U.S. everybody with a yard was expected to have a Victory Garden, and nobody’s individual Victory Garden won the war. Perhaps not even all the Victory Gardens together freed enough cropland to feed the soldiers. But these gardens displayed purpose and resolve. That’s what Mobile’s refusal to host more fossil fuel tanks would do.
Yet the subcommittee acted like they don’t care to be even their own port city’s keeper. In Florida, at least, officials have an excuse for such behavior. The governor has ordered them to delete from their vocabularies all such terms as global warming, climate change, melting icecaps, rising seas.
In Mobile officials do this voluntarily. Perhaps their silence springs from fear of political retribution if they acknowledge that those global trends result from fossil foolishness. But even if these officials stand among the dwindling corps who sincerely deny the obvious, they still ought to address it.
This has become a subject that no longer submits to silence. Too many people have become too anxious about it for deniers in authority to merely ignore it. They need to address it, if only to swat it aside. But the subcommittee said nothing.
When this issue reaches the full planning commission, they also will be tempted to maintain a politically safe silence. Then the city council.
To avoid singeing their fingers on the hot potato, they will let the planet continue to cook.
Imagine the reaction if they said instead that they will not permit the expansion of tank farms on the Mobile waterfront. And challenged all other port cities to do the same.
It would be a revolutionary act. Also sane and healthy.
Fixing railroad tank cars gains traction after recent derailments
By Curtis Tate, McClatchy Washington Bureau, March 30, 2015
Recently filled, a tanker truck drives past railway cars containing crude oil on railroad tracks in McClellan Park in North Highlands on Wednesday, March 19, 2014. North Highlands is a suburb just outside the city limits of Sacramento, Calif. RANDALL BENTON — MCT
WASHINGTON — While some government and industry officials have repeatedly said there’s no silver bullet to improve the safety of oil trains, a persistent problem runs through every new derailment: the tank cars.
Oil industry groups maintain that railroads should do a better job of maintaining track to prevent derailments, while the rail industry has called for more robust tank cars that are better equipped to survive accidents.
Although there’s almost universal consensus that improvements are required in both areas, there’s one key difference.
Railroads have already spent heavily in recent years to improve their track for all kinds of freight and have pledged to spend more. Meanwhile, the companies that own and lease tank cars for transporting oil and other flammable liquids have been waiting for regulators to approve a more robust design to account for the exponential increase in energy traffic on the rails before they invest an additional cent.
The railroad industry petitioned the U.S. Department of Transportation in March 2011 for a more robust tank-car design. Rather than wait for an answer, the industry adopted its own upgrades later that year. But several recent derailments involving different types of crude have suggested that those cars don’t perform significantly better than those they replaced.
The DOT-111A tank car
About 92,000 DOT-111s are in use; 78,000 lack extra safety features. Most tank cars are leased by oil companies or other firms moving products by rail.
And unlike the controversy that surrounds other proposed solutions or doubts about their effectiveness, tank car upgrades have the support of lawmakers, regulators, mayors and governors, community and industry groups, and the National Transportation Safety Board.
“We certainly have been distracted from doing what is the most obvious safety improvement: the cars,” said Peter Goelz, former managing director of the NTSB.
The White House Office of Management and Budget is reviewing a package of proposals that include an improved tank-car design. But the new rules aren’t scheduled to be published until May, frustrating many who’ve pushed for better tank cars for years.
For more than two decades, the NTSB has called for improving the most common type of tank car, the DOT-111. But those calls were largely ignored until railroads started carrying dramatically larger volumes of domestically produced crude oil and ethanol.
The minimally reinforced cars proved vulnerable to punctures in derailments, spilling their contents, which quickly caught fire. Such fires could compromise other cars by heating their contents to the point where they burst through the tank walls with explosive force.
“Once you get a leak and fire, that can spread to other cars,” said Greg Saxton, chief engineer for the Greenbrier Companies, which is already building a tank car to tougher standards. “That’s the No. 1 thing we want to do. We don’t want to have a leak.”
After a July 2013 oil train derailment in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killed 47 people, Canada’s Transportation Safety Board found that none of the cars in that incident was equipped with thermal protection. The cars that sustained only minor impact damage ultimately ripped open after fire exposure, violently releasing their pressurized contents as large fireballs.
The rail industry made a few modifications to DOT-111 cars manufactured since 2011, including shields that protected the bottom half of each end of the car and more reinforcement for valves and outlets. But an outer steel jacket to provide extra puncture resistance and insulation to protect the car’s contents from fire exposure were optional.
In recent derailments in West Virginia, Illinois and Ontario, the newer cars, called CPC-1232s, lacked those extra safeguards.
“Do we need a new standard for tank cars? Absolutely,” said Ed Hamberger, president and CEO of the Association of American Railroads, the industry’s principal advocacy group.
Those existing cars could be retrofitted with jackets and thermal insulation until new ones are built. But even those improvements are waiting on the White House for final approval.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., along with three Democratic co-sponsors – Patty Murray of Washington state, Dianne Feinstein of California and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin – introduced a bill last week that would require an immediate ban on crude oil shipments in DOT-111 and non-jacketed CPC-1232 tank cars. It also would force new cars to meet a standard that exceeds any current requirement.
“No one wants to pull the trigger and say they should be removed,” she said in an interview. “We can’t wait to see a more aggressive plan.”
The redesigned tank car may look like the one the Canadian government proposed this month. It includes full-height shields on both ends, thermal insulation and an outer jacket.
Last year, railroads voluntarily agreed to limit oil train speeds to 40 mph in a select number of densely populated areas and 50 mph everywhere else. But six of the most recent derailments cast doubt on the effectiveness of reducing speeds as a mitigation measure.
All the trains in the four most recent U.S. derailments that resulted in fires or spills were going under 40 mph. Three were traveling at less than 25 mph and one at just 9 mph. In the two most recent Canadian wrecks, the trains were traveling at 38 and 43 mph.
The Federal Railroad Administration wants railroads to install electronic braking systems on trains that carry crude oil. But the industry opposes new braking requirements, and they wouldn’t address the vulnerabilities of tank cars to punctures and fire exposure.
Even those who support an “all of the above” approach to dealing with the problem say tank car improvements are a crucial step.
“It’s unfortunate to have the NTSB investigating the same accident over and over again,” said Jim Hall, a former NTSB chairman. “We’re overdue in addressing this issue with the DOT-111.”
By Dan Gunderson, Mar 29, 2015 at 6:37 p.m.
Oil containers sat at a train depot outside Williston, North Dakota. Andrew Burton | Getty Images 2013
MOORHEAD, Minn. — North Dakota environmentalists want oil companies to reduce volatile gasses in Bakken crude. Regulators, however, say they’re taking a different tack that’s cheaper for the industry and still improves safety.
The gasses remain a flashpoint for producers, environmental and safety groups concerned about transporting the highly flammable Bakken crude. Oil train shipments from the Bakken have skyrocketed in recent years, heightening the worries.
Environmental groups have been pushing the state to require that producers install equipment to stabilize the crude using a process that heats the oil to a higher temperature to release more gasses.
North Dakota officials, however, say the more stringent heating requirement would cost oil companies as much as $2 per barrel.
Instead, state inspectors starting April 1 will check oil at well sites to make sure the vapor pressure runs no greater than 13.7 pounds per square inch of Reid Vapor Pressure, the measurement standard of volatile gases in crude oil. Oil involved in a recent West Virginia derailment and explosion had a vapor pressure slightly higher, 13.9 psi.
The North Dakota standard is tougher than the 14.7 psi federal standard for crude oil, although it’s still more volatile than gasoline sold in Minnesota in the summer, which has a maximum vapor pressure of 9.
Regulators say their method will maintain safety but cost an estimated 10 cents a barrel, compared to the $2 per barrel for the stabilization gas removal process. Companies found violating the new regulation can be fined $12,500 per day.
The industry disputes that Bakken crude is more volatile, but says most North Dakota crude meets the new standard already.
“I think a lot of people have wondered, well, is this going to cure the problem. And our answer is that by itself, it is not the cure,” said Lynn Helms, director of North Dakota’s Department of Mineral Resources.
The new, lower vapor standard is a step in the right direction but safer rail cars are also a critical part of the solution, Helms added. The federal government is considering new rules for safer tank cars that might include thicker steel shells and larger pressure relief valves.
“If you combine our lower vapor pressure standard with the these high capacity relief valves we should be able to get away from these boiling liquid explosive vapor incidents which create the large explosions if and when we have a derailment,” Helms added.
Larger relief valves could allow rapidly expanding gases to escape, preventing rail tank cars from exploding. But critics point out those volatile gases could still catch fire. A newer tank car with improved safety features, the CPC 1232, has been involved in at least two recent oil train derailment and explosion incidents.
Environmentalists argue North Dakota could make the oil much safer.
“The bottom line profitability of the oil industry is trumping all the rest of us, our safety,” said Don Morrison with the North Dakota environmental group Dakota Resource Council.
Much of the light crude oil in Texas is stabilized before it’s shipped, he added. “To stabilize the oil so it is safer like they do in Texas, oil companies are going to have to spend some money. That is true. But isn’t that the cost of doing business?”
The North Dakota Petroleum Council, which represents the oil industry, did not respond to an interview request.
In December 2013, the potential for disaster became very real after train cars of Bakken oil derailed, caught fire and exploded outside Casselton, N.D., near the Minnesota state line. Derailments and fires involving Bakken crude since then have heightened the worry.
Fred Millar, a Washington-based lobbyist and consultant on hazardous materials transportation, contends the new North Dakota standards would not have changed the outcome of a deadly 2013 oil train explosion in Lac Megantic, Quebec in Canada.
Train cars of Bakken crude involved in the Lac Megantic explosion and fire had a vapor pressure of about 9 psi, according to Canadian investigators.
A search of public records and news reports identified 14 derailments involving crude oil trains in the past two years in North America. Fire was involved in nine of the accidents.
New regulations are unlikely to stop crude oil train accidents, Millar said.
“Anybody who’s kind of hoping that somehow there’s going to be this magic bullet or some new set of federal regulations that’s going to make this situation safe,” he said, “I have bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.”
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