Category Archives: DOT-111

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, DOT-111, Tank car identification

Oil industry recommends: use “highest-danger” labeling on bakken oil tank cars

Repost from Reuters
[Editor: The oil industry recommends highest-danger labeling on Bakken crude oil tank cars despite its misleading claim that Bakken is no different from other light sweet crudes.  This stance puts pressure on the rail industry to come up with stronger tank cars sooner.  Um… follow the money?  – RS]

Oil group wants highest-danger label for Bakken rail shipments

New York, Aug 5, 2014

Aug 5 (Reuters) – A U.S. oil industry group is recommending that all crude shipped by rail from North Dakota’s Bakken fields be labeled as the most-dangerous type of oil cargo, a designation that could hasten the use of new or upgraded tank cars.

On Monday, the North Dakota Petroleum Council (NDPC) released the final results of a wide-scale study on the quality characteristics of Bakken crude, which has been involved in several fiery oil-train derailments over the past year.

The study confirmed preliminary findings released in May suggesting that Bakken was little different from other forms of light, sweet U.S. crude and posed no greater threat versus other fuels when transported by rail.

The NDPC also issued a series of recommendations following the study, however, including one urging oil-by-rail shippers to classify all Bakken crude oil as “Packing Group I” hazardous materials.

That is the highest-risk level of a three-tiered danger assessment, and the NDPC said it was recommended “even though the majority of samples tested for the study would fall within specifications for PG (Packing Group) II.”

Current methods for testing boiling point, the key criteria for differentiating PG I and II classifications, can be inconsistent, the NDPC said. Because it typically contains a high proportion of very light hydrocarbons and petroleum gases, Bakken crude tends to boil at lower temperatures.

“The margin of error for the test methodology can result in different labs testing the same sample with values meeting both PGs. PG I has the more stringent standards and is therefore recommended to avoid further confusion,” said the NDPC report, which was prepared by industry consultants Turner, Mason & Co.

Historically the Packing Group label has made no material difference in how oil is handled on trains; its only purpose was to inform emergency responders about the cargo. The DOT-111 tank car, the model used almost exclusively to ship oil by rail, is able to transport any Packing Group. Many oil companies have been using PG I routinely simply to ensure they were compliant.

But under new regulations proposed last month by the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Packing Group determination could become a pivotal factor in determining how quickly shippers use new or upgraded tank cars that will gradually replace older-model DOT-111s long seen as flawed.

The NDPC represents major producers in the Bakken including Marathon Oil Corp, ConocoPhillips, Continental Resources and Hess.

Authorities had already begun to crack down on misclassified oil shipments after the Lac Megantic tragedy in Canada last year, when a runaway oil-train with cargo from the Bakken energy patch derailed and killed 47 people in the center of a Quebec town.

In February, the DOT’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) fined three companies for using incorrect Packing Group labels for their Bakken cargoes. Two of them had mislabeled shipments as PG II, when in fact they should have been labeled PG I. A third company had used a PG III label rather than PG II.

The DOT rules last month said older model DOT-111 cars would not be allowed to carry Packing Group I crudes within two years, while less dangerous crudes that fall into PGs II and III could still be shipped in the older cars for three and five years.

The rules are open to public comment and may not be finalized for several months.

[Editor: To send a comment, see Two-month comment period starts for new federal oil train rules. -RS]

In its own study released last month, the PHMSA said most crude from the Bakken tested as PG I or II material – “with a predominance to PG I”. It also said the oil was “more volatile than most other types of crude,” a finding disputed by both the American Petroleum Institute and NDPC.

(Reporting by Jonathan Leff; Editing by Tom Brown)
Crude By Rail, Derailment, DOT-111, Ethanol, Federal Rail Administration

South Carolina ethanol train derailment raises concerns

Repost from Greenville Online
[Editor: Note that recent new DOT rules do NOT require rail carriers to notify state emergency agencies concerning movement of ethanol trains.  Significant quote: “Ethanol rail transportation increased 500 percent from 2003-2012, according to the Association of American Railroads, while rail transport of crude oil increased more than 4,000 percent since 2008, according to Department of Transportation figures.”  Details on the derailment here.  – RS]

Upstate derailment puts focus on potential dangers

Nathaniel Cary, The Greenville News, August 4, 2014

Several times a week trains hauling millions of gallons of ethanol lumber along tracks through the heart of Upstate cities and towns, carrying the flammable gas toward a plant in Belton, where it’s then delivered to gas stations across the Southeast.

But in the dead of night on a recent Friday, something went wrong on the train’s journey.

It happened at 1:30 a.m. July 25 while the city of Spartanburg slept. A train, operated by CSX, went off the track. Before it could stop, an engine, a hopper car filled with sand and three tank cars filled with ethanol ended up in a ditch.

The ethanol-filled tankers landed upside down, and there they sat, within sight of houses and a few hundred yards across a field overgrown with kudzu from the city’s railroad museum and AMTRAK station.

The train was pulling 90 black tank cars filled with about two million gallons of ethanol, more than enough to fill three Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Fortunately, the train was moving very slowly around a curve and none of the cars punctured. No liquid spilled, no fire ignited, said Spartanburg Fire Chief Marion Blackwell.

Investigators with the Federal Railroad Administration are still trying to determine what caused the engine to leave the track, but the wreck highlighted a safety debate that’s arisen as the amount of crude oil and ethanol the nation transports by rail has increased exponentially with the country’s energy boom.

The Department of Transportation has proposed new rules to improve oil and ethanol train safety in the wake of derailments in recent years that have killed dozens, caused evacuations and spilled millions of gallons of oil and ethanol.

Transportation safety officials say trains are transporting higher amounts of crude oil and ethanol on trains that can stretch a mile long. Tank cars aren’t built thick enough to prevent punctures and spills when they are involved in accidents, and trains are driving too fast through urban areas, officials say.

Last July, a train operator didn’t brake sufficiently when a 72-car oil train went around a curve in the Quebec city of Lac Megantic. The train derailed and cars exploded, killing 47 people. Fires burned for days and destroyed the village center.

One woman died and two others were seriously injured in June 2009 while they waited at a train crossing in Cherry Hill, Illinois, when an ethanol train derailed and caught fire. An ethanol train that derailed in Pennsylvania in 2006 spilled 485,000 gallons and caused a two-day evacuation in parts of the city of New Brighton.

In South Carolina, there have been 145 incidents involving transportation of Class 3 flammable liquids — which includes crude oil and ethanol — by rail since 1972, when the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration began keeping track of data.

No lives were lost in those incidents, but they caused $2.8 million in damages, according to PHMSA data.

The most devastating train accident in South Carolina since 1972 took place in Graniteville in 2005 when a Norfolk Southern train carrying chlorine — a Class 2 gas — crashed into an idle train.

One of the tank cars holding chlorine breached and released the gas into the air. The train engineer and eight others died and 554 people were checked at hospitals for breathing difficulty, according to an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.

“I thought the wake-up call here would have been the chlorine gas spill,” said Susan Corbett, president of the 5,400-member South Carolina chapter of the Sierra Club.

The Sierra Club has come out in support of the proposed safety rules, though the club’s stance is that it’s taken too long to draft the rules and will take too long to implement the changes over the next three years.

“Anytime you’re moving this stuff around, either by rail or by truck, there’s always a risk,” Corbett said. “It definitely is something that should be of concern for all of us because of the health risks and disasters.”

Local routes

Trains carrying large quantities of ethanol travel through cities and towns in the Upstate more than 150 times every year. The routes run through the heart of Spartanburg and Greenville and through smaller towns like Williamston and Pelzer.

Most of the trains originate in Illinois and normally stretch 82 cars long, said Steven Hawkins, who as president and CEO of the Greenville & Western Railway Co., which owns and operates 13 miles of rail line from Pelzer to Belton in Anderson County, hauls the trains for the final leg of their trip.

The trains hold 80 cars of ethanol and two hopper cars, one at each end, filled with sand or gluten to act as a buffer between the “ignition source” engine and the hazardous materials cars, Hawkins said.

CSX runs the route from Illinois to Pelzer, where Hawkins’ Greenville & Western takes over, driving the final six miles to an ethanol plant in Belton owned by Lincoln Energy Solutions, a Greenville-based biofuel delivery company, he said.

That’s the route the train was following when it derailed in Spartanburg, CSX officials have said.

Greenville & Western runs about 150 routes each year with the hazardous material cars, he said.

The transportation safety board says the surge in ethanol production has altered the way ethanol is transported by rail. It used to be carried in smaller quantities, but now entire trains carry nothing but the flammable gas additive.

Ethanol rail transportation increased 500 percent from 2003-2012, according to the Association of American Railroads, while rail transport of crude oil increased more than 4,000 percent since 2008, according to Department of Transportation figures.

“While the soaring volumes of crude oil and ethanol traveling by rail has been good for business, there is a corresponding obligation to protect our communities and our environment,” said NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman.

CSX participated in the Department of Transportation review and analysis of the current transportation practices and tank car standards and works closely with first responders, communities, oil producers, tank car owners and other railroads “to make the safe transportation of these important products ever safer,” CSX spokeswoman Carla Groleau said.

In May, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx issued an emergency order for rail carriers to notify state emergency agencies when trains pass through their states carrying more than 20 cars of volatile crude oil harvested from the Bakken shale region in North Dakota.

The South Carolina Emergency Management Division received notice from both of the state’s major rail carriers, CSX and Norfolk Southern, that they don’t transport Bakken crude oil through South Carolina in those amounts, spokesman Joe Farmer told The Greenville News.

No such notification is required for trains carrying ethanol.

Safety proposal

The Department of Transportation wants to phase out outdated tank cars — called DOT-111s — it calls vulnerable to puncture and explosion in a derailment.

Trains with any of the older cars would face speed limits of 40 miles per hour.

Tank car owners could retrofit the cars with a safer shell and better braking rather than switch to a new tank style. Trains that meet all standards could travel 50 mph outside of 100,000-population cities. Trains that don’t upgrade to enhanced braking systems would face a 30 mph limit.

The Department of Transportation would also require a risk assessment of rail routes and railroad conditions that high-hazard flammable trains use.

National ethanol groups balked at the safety proposals announced by the Department of Transportation, saying ethanol isn’t as volatile as Bakken crude oil and that the rules may paint with too broad a brush by classifying oil and ethanol together.

“Ethanol is a low volatility, consistent commercial product with a 99.997 percent rail safety record,” said Bob Dinneen, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association. “Unlike oil from fracking, ethanol is not a highly volatile feedstock of unknown and differing quality and characteristics being shipped to a refinery for commercial use.”

But ethanol and oil trains both use the DOT-111s that the NTSB called inadequate in the aftermath of the Cherry Hill ethanol disaster.

Only 14,000 tank cars of the 92,000 in the North American fleet are built to the latest industry standards, according to the Association of American Railroads.

The rules won’t change operations for the Greenville & Western because its train only travels 25 miles per hour and it doesn’t own any of the tank cars it transports, Hawkins said.

Tank car safety changes will be up to the shippers since they own most tank cars, he said.

Hawkins, who bought the short-rail line in 2006 after a 20-year-career in rail service, said he’s got a spotless safety record.

“We’re already at such a low speed anyway, not that we ever want to have that type of incident as has occurred, but at the slow speed that we operate, it would be a non-event,” Hawkins said.

CPC-1232 standard, DOT-111, Ethanol, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Tank car retrofit, Train speed

Ethanol dependent on old-style tank cars

Repost from Argus

Railway Supply Institute: Ethanol dependent on old-style tank cars

1 Aug 2014

Houston  — The US ethanol industry is particularly vulnerable to pending regulatory changes that will require retrofitting or retiring a type of railcar that carries 98pc of ethanol production.

In comments to the US Department of Transportation’s (DOT) planned changes to tank car design released last week, the Railway Supply Institute (RSI) said about 29,200 of the approximately 29,780 tank cars moving ethanol as of June were doing so in unjacketed old-style DOT-111 tank cars. Those cars must be retrofitted or retired under the proposed rules.

Jackets add another layer of steel to the tank, increasing overall protection. They are an option to retrofit DOT-111s to make them safer.

DOT-111 cars have been under renewed scrutiny since several exploded into flames in a July 2013 derailment at Lac-Megantic, Quebec, killing 47 people. Four more fiery crude-by-rail accidents since then spun regulators in both the US and Canada into action on car design.

But it was an ethanol train derailment in June 2009 that spurred the first wave of action. The Cherry Valley, Illinois, accident killed one person and prompted industry to voluntarily strengthen car design in 2011, creating the current industry standard known as CPC-1232.

But despite the reliance on older DOT-111s to move ethanol, documentation from the Surface Transportation Board and the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration shows there was only one ethanol-by-rail accident last year — with no release or fire — compared with five crude-by-rail accidents.

The last reported US ethanol-by-rail accident involving a fire was in August 2012 at Plevna, Montana, when 17 cars derailed and 12 spilled more than 245,000 USG.

According to RSI’s comments to the DOT, which were released last week along with a series of proposals on new speed limits and tank car design for flammable liquids, 580 tank cars either of the newer CPC-1232 model or jacketed DOT-111s were moving ethanol in June, making up 2pc of the fleet.

Meanwhile, of the 42,550 tank cars moving crude in June, 19,750 either were newer-model CPC-1232 or DOT-111 with jacketing, accounting for 46pc.

“Our industry’s rapid expansion occurred in 2005-2006-2007, and the only cars made available were the [DOT-111] cars, which were purchased or leased with the expectation of a 40- or 50-year lifespan,” Bob Dinneen, chief executive of the Renewable Fuels Association, told Argus. “When you started to see a lot more crude oil moving from the Bakken, by then the [CPC-1232] cars were being made available, so they were lucky to get those cars.”

DOT last week suggested that DOT-111 tank cars be retired after two years, to be replaced either by a more stringent design it has proposed, another proposed by the Association of American Railroads that is largely similar except that it lacks electronically controlled pneumatic brakes, or continuation of the current CPC-1232 design.

The initial regulatory push is too broad-brush and should be more focused on crude, Dinneen said.

“They ought to be prioritizing by the commodity about which, by their own admission, they are most concerned,” Dinneen said, referring to light crude. Conversely, the American Petroleum Institute chastised the government for singling out Bakken crude, which it said is no more volatile than other grades.

Yesterday, railcar lessor GATX also called for a more commodity-based approach to the DOT-111 phase-out, saying it is not currently clear what markets DOT-111s might serve once they are banned from crude or ethanol use.

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Derailment, DOT-111, Explosion, Hazmat notification, Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Rail inspection, Tank car retrofit, Train braking systems, Train speed

Chicago Sun-Times editorial: Old tank cars put Chicago at risk

Repost from The Chicago Sun-Times

Old tank cars put Chicago at risk

Editorials, July 31, 2014
This July 6, 2013 file photo shows a worker, wearing protective gear moving though the wreckage of the oil train derailment and explosion in in Lac-Megantic, Quebec (AP Photo/Ryan Remiorz, File, Pool)
This July 6, 2013 file photo shows a worker, wearing protective gear moving though the wreckage of the oil train derailment and explosion in in Lac-Megantic, Quebec (AP Photo/Ryan Remiorz, File, Pool)

America’s drilling boom means more freight trains are snaking through Chicago carrying oil, which can erupt into fireballs if the tank cars derail. A new federal proposal to make the cars safer should be enacted as quickly as possible, and any changes in the final rules should enhance safety, not weaken it.

On July 23, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx proposed phasing out tens of thousands of tank cars called DOT-111s that date back to the 1960s and that too easily rupture or get punctured in derailments. In the past six years, oil has spilled in 10 major derailments, many of them fiery. In the worst, 47 people died last year in Quebec. In April, 30,000 gallons of crude oil leaked into the James River amid a blazing derailment near downtown Lynchburg, Va.

Because more than 40 oil-carrying trains pass through metropolitan Chicago every week, the safety proposal is critical. Mayor Rahm Emanuel called it a “very important step to reduce the risk of catastrophic disasters in our cities.”

The weaknesses of older tank cars, which include about 78,000 of the 92,000 now in use, have been known for 25 years. But now there’s a new reason to worry about them. A boom in American oil production, largely due to hydraulic fracturing — or fracking — that extracts petroleum from places where oil pipelines don’t go, has led to a surge in oil-carrying freights. Nationwide, the number of oil carloads jumped from 9,500 in 2008 to 434,000 last year. Trains carrying crude often are longer than 100 tank cars and can carry more than a million gallons.

In May, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued an emergency order requiring railroads to notify local officials before trains carrying large quantities of crude pass through. Now, the department has proposed a range of additional safety options, including requiring new or retrofitted tank cars to have thicker shells, more effective brakes and roll-over protections. Tank cars that don’t meet the new standards would be phased out after two years if they carry the most flammable fuels, including ethanol and most grades of crude oil.

Foxx also is calling for speed limits on trains transporting the fuels, especially through highly populated areas, and testing of the liquids they carry.

The proposals will go through negotiations, including a public comment period, before the final rules come out. Not everyone will agree: Industry representatives, for example, think the proposed speed limits are too low and environmentalists think they are too high.

Fortunately, industry players, including the Association of American Railroads and the American Petroleum Institute, agree tank cars need to be safer. They have offered their own safety enhancements, which don’t go as far as those proposed by Foxx. For example, they want a three-year phase-out period instead of two and would select a design used on tank cars built since 2011 as the new, safer standard.

The final rules should take into account legitimate concerns of business and environmentalists, but the government shouldn’t significantly water down the safety proposals nor let negotiations drag on, putting off the day crude shipments get safer.

We don’t want to see any disastrous fireballs along the many rail lines running through Chicago and its suburbs.