Category Archives: Environmental Impacts

Congressional Research Service, Derailment, Environmental Impacts, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Rail accidents, Rail Safety, Rail tanker cars, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Department of Transportation

Virginians concerned about explosions, spills near Chesapeake Bay

Repost from The Daily Press, Hampton Roads, Virginia

Crude oil tanker trains to Yorktown ignite controversy

Three derailments, explosions in U.S. and Canada in past six months highlight dangers

 April 05, 2014|By Tamara Dietrich, tdietrich@dailypress.com

Virginia environmentalists and activists are worried that an uptick in tanker trains carrying petroleum crude oil to a new storage and shipping hub in Yorktown is a recipe for disaster.

At issue is crude oil from the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota — the same crude that’s been implicated in derailments and explosions over the past several months from Quebec to Alabama, and is now being shipped by rail through heavily populated and environmentally sensitive areas of the commonwealth.

“These trains are traveling through Lynchburg along the James River through Richmond and on to the York County facility on the York River,” said Glen Besa of the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club. “We’re concerned that a train derailment could result in an explosion and the loss of life, or an oil spill that could jeopardize our drinking water supplies and the environment.”

The group says tanker trains carrying Bakken crude began arriving in Yorktown in December, and is calling on the public and first-responders to be aware of the risks associated with those trains and ensure measures are in place to prevent accidents and, if necessary, effectively respond to them.

Meanwhile, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation is calling on the commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard to take action to reduce the risk of a devastating spill in the vulnerable estuary as “dramatically” increasing amounts of crude oil are likely to roll into Yorktown in the coming years, then get barged out again to East Coast refineries.

The bay is “on borrowed time in the face of a major oil spill,” CBF President William C. Baker said in a recent letter to Adm. Robert J. Papp Jr.

Safety a priority

The storage depot is the former Yorktown Refinery, a 600-acre facility that for decades converted crude oil into gasoline and other fuels. It closed in 2010 and cost the county one of its biggest industries and tax sources.

Houston-based Plains All American Pipeline LP bought the facility for $220 million in 2011, and over the past two years spent $150 million to convert it to a transportation terminal, according to spokesman Brad Leone and news reports.

“Plains made a significant investment to expand and modernize the existing rail and dock infrastructure, which has made the facility even safer and more efficient,” Leone said.

The Yorktown Terminal supports 90 full-time jobs, he said, and has the capacity to unload 140,000 barrels a day and store 6 million barrels.

CSX Transportation, based in Jacksonville, Fla., provides rail service to the terminal as part of its 23-state network.

“CSX appreciates that the shipment of energy products is a topic of concern for citizens here in Virginia and across the country,” said spokeswoman Melanie Cost, adding that the company places the “highest priority” on community safety.

Most of its crude oil shipments originate in the Bakken region, she said.

The risk

After three train derailments and explosions in six months involving crude from the Bakken Shale region, the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration issued a safety alert in January that this crude “may be more flammable” than other types of oil. The PHMSA is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Last July, an oil train carrying Bakken crude derailed and ignited a catastrophic explosion in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, killing 47 people, leveling the small town and causing more than $1 billion in damages.

In November, a 90-car crude oil train was traveling through a rural part of Alabama when 20 cars derailed and 11 of them exploded. An unknown amount of crude fouled nearby wetlands, and damage was estimated at nearly $4 million.

Then, in December, a crude-oil train collided with a derailed grain car in North Dakota. Of the 21 oil cars that derailed, 18 ruptured and exploded. About 400,000 gallons of crude were released into the environment, and 1,400 residents had to be evacuated. Damage was estimated at $8 million.

In response, the DOT issued an amended emergency order last month directed at companies that offer petroleum crude oil and carry it by rail.

The Bakken formation has become “a major source for oil production” in this country, the order noted, and the risk of flammability is compounded because crude oil is commonly shipped in bulk on large unit trains.

The Congressional Research Service reported to Congress in February that shipping more crude oil on bigger trains increases the risk of accidents and the size of the resulting fires and explosions.

The controversial Keystone Pipeline would service the Bakken formation, but it is unknown if that pipeline will ever be built. If large tanker trains are used instead, federal agencies project about 49 more injuries and six more deaths each year.

Force a fix

In its emergency order, the DOT requires that bulk quantities of crude oil be properly tested and classed, and be treated as a hazardous material when shipped in rail tank cars. It also forbids deliberate misclassification.

Bakken Crude, Bay Area Air Quality Management District, Bay Area Refineries, Environmental Impacts, Kinder Morgan, Public Health, Public Safety, Valero Crude By Rail, WesPac Energy

SF Chronicle: Green groups sue Bay Area Air Quality Management District

Repost from the San Francisco Chronicle

Oil trains into Richmond spark lawsuit

By David R. Baker, April 5, 2014
A BNSF Railway train, above, hauls crude oil near Wolf Point, Mont. Photo: Matthew Brown, Associated Press
A BNSF Railway train, above, hauls crude oil near Wolf Point, Mont. Photo: Matthew Brown, Associated Press

Little noticed by neighbors, trains carrying crude oil from the Great Plains have been rumbling into a Richmond rail yard.

The cargo is the same kind of crude that fueled a deadly explosion last summer when a train carrying the oil derailed in a small Quebec town, killing 47. Now environmentalists are suing to prevent any more shipments to Richmond.

The suit, filed last week in state Superior Court in San Francisco, would revoke a permit issued by a regional agency in February that allows Kinder Morgan to unload oil trains in Richmond at a facility originally built to unload ethanol.

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District granted the permit without studying how the switch from shipping ethanol to oil could affect the environment, said Kristen Boyles, staff attorney with Earthjustice, the group that filed the suit on behalf of four other environmental organizations.

A placard on a tank car in North Dakota, below, warns that it's carrying flammable crude oil. Trains like these are being used more frequently to deliver petroleum to California. Photo: Matthew Brown, Associated Press
A placard on a tank car in North Dakota, below, warns that it’s carrying flammable crude oil. Trains like these are being used more frequently to deliver petroleum to California. Photo: Matthew Brown, Associated Press

“These things are going in without a lot of thought to their safety, their impact on the environment and their possible health effects,” Boyles said. “That’s what’s really frustrating with this situation – how little we know until this is rolling through our backyards.”

Kinder Morgan declined comment.

Ralph Borrmann, an agency spokesman, said the change in fuels handled by Kinder Morgan’s rail-yard facility would not increase air pollution – his agency’s primary concern.

“There were no emissions consequences as a result of the permit, no net increase of emissions, which is what we look at,” Borrmann said.

Just a few years ago, California didn’t import oil by rail. But that’s changing fast.

In 2009, railways carried just 45,000 barrels of oil into the Golden State, according to the California Energy Commission. By last year, that number had soared to 6.2 million barrels. A barrel equals 42 gallons.

Petroleum glut

California’s refineries have turned to rail to access a glut of petroleum in the Great Plains. Oil production in the Bakken Shale formation that lies beneath North Dakota and Montana has surged so much, so quickly, that area’s pipelines lack the capacity to transport the fuel. As a result, the Bakken oil sells at a discount to other kinds of crude.

Oil by rail is “about discounted oil, delivered to your doorstep,” said Gordon Schremp, senior analyst with the Energy Commission.

The amount of oil carried by rail is rising nationwide. While most of those shipments reach their destination without incident, the United States and Canada have recently seen a series of oil-train accidents leading to explosions and fires, including last July’s derailment in Lac-Megantic, Quebec. In January, the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration issued an alert warning that Bakken crude, much lighter than many other grades of oil, may be more flammable as well.

Benicia refinery

The warning spurred opposition to a series of oil-by-rail projects in California. Valero’s refinery in Benicia is seeking approval to build a rail yard that could move 70,000 barrels of oil each day, replacing more than half of the petroleum the refinery now imports from abroad, via ship.

In Pittsburg, another project would bring in oil by ship, pipeline and rail. The $200 million proposal, by WesPac Energy, would refurbish an old Pacific Gas and Electric Co. facility to import, store and supply oil to Bay Area refineries.

Community groups have spent months fighting those proposals. But most Richmond residents knew nothing about Kinder Morgan’s Richmond rail facility until television station KPIX reported on the issue last month.

Kinder Morgan applied to convert its existing ethanol offloading facility last year, and won an operating permit from the air district in February. KPIX filmed trucks carrying oil from the facility to the Tesoro refinery in Martinez.

Tesoro’s comment

A Tesoro spokeswoman on Friday declined to confirm whether the refinery collaborates with Kinder Morgan’s Richmond facility. But she said the refinery uses about 5,000 to 10,000 barrels of oil per day taken from rail shipments, equal to between two and four train shipments per month.

Earthjustice and its partners in the suit – the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Communities for a Better Environment, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club – want Kinder Morgan’s operating permit in Richmond revoked until the company conducts a full environmental impact review.

“The risk of train accidents is huge with this kind of crude oil,” Boyles said.

A tanker truck is filled from 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, CA. (Randall Benton/Sacramento Bee/MCT) Photo: Randall Benton, McClatchy-Tribune News Service
A tanker truck is filled from 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, CA. (Randall Benton/Sacramento Bee/MCT) Photo: Randall Benton, McClatchy-Tribune News Service
Bay Area Air Quality Management District, California Air Resources Board (CARB), California Regulation, Climate Change, Environmental Impacts, Local Regulation, Public Health

Bay Area Air District sets new goals for 2050

Repost from The Contra Costa Times

Bay Area Air Quality Management District adopts plan to control greenhouse gases

By Denis Cuff Contra Costa Times
Posted: 04/03/2014

It has fought to rein in smog and smoke for years, but now the Bay Area’s air pollution board is tackling a new challenge: reducing greenhouse gases.

A plan to speed up work on reducing global warming gases from the region’s businesses, industries and residents was adopted Wednesday by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District Board.

Under one of the 10 measures, the district will review its industrial and business pollution rules to decide if changes are needed to cut down on carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases.

Any changes in regional rules would be closely coordinated with the state Air Resources Board, the leader of the state’s climate control effort, air district officials said.

“It’s very important we complement what the state is doing and not cause confusion or conflict,” said Henry Hilken, the air district’s director of planning and research.

If rule changes are made, they likely will focus on making industries change operations to make less pollution, rather than to control it afterwards, he added.

The clean air agency also will increase its technical advice to cities and counties considering local climate action measures such as setting local building energy efficiency standards. The district also will help seek funding for those local agencies.

To prepare for the extra workload, the air district later this year will propose adding four new employees to work on greenhouse gas issues.

Under the plan, the district will monitor the region’s progress toward meeting state goals for reducing greenhouse gas levels 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

If the region isn’t moving fast enough, the district will announce it, then coordinate efforts by city, county, state, federal and regional efforts to close the gap.

Under old estimates yet to be updated, the Bay Area in 1990 generated some 87.7 million tons of greenhouse gases equivalent to carbon dioxide. An 80 percent cut would drop that to 17.5 metric tons.

Those figures are likely to be modified when the air district updates its estimates, officials said.

Actions to control greenhouse gases will not only protect the earth from overheating, but also help to reduce Bay Area smog and fine particle pollution, Hilken said.

Most of this plan is geared at actions to be taken in the next two years, before more permanent measures are adopted in 2015.

Bay Area, Environmental Impacts, Oil Industry, Public Safety, Rail accidents, Rail industry

Is crude by rail coming to a town near me?

1 Comment

Repost from unEARTHED – The Earth Justice Blog

28 March 2014, 11:41 AM
Jessica Knoblauch

Explosive Crude By Rail Trains Roll Into Main Street America

Concerned communities fight back

 

Vice Mayor Linda Maio, joined by Mayor Tom Bates and Council member Darryl Moore, speaks out in support of resident opposition to a proposed crude by rail project. (Photo credit: Mauricio Castillo)

Is crude by rail coming to a town near me?

For weeks, I’ve been asking myself that question as I kept hearing about the skyrocketing number of trains that are transporting crude oil throughout the U.S. to east and west coast export facilities.

And I’m not alone.

This week, I attended a protest by my fellow neighbors in Berkeley, California, to stop crude by rail shipments coming through our town. The crude oil boom is brought on by fracking in North Dakota and drilling in Canada’s Alberta tar sands. Both forms of crude are hazardous—Bakken shale crude from North Dakota is highly flammable and tar sands oil is extremely corrosive and also difficult to clean up.

Not surprisingly, once people hear how explosive and dangerous this crude can be when spilled, they really don’t want it traveling through their main streets…or anywhere else. But travel it does. Hundreds of miles, in fact, through rural towns and along main streets, along densely populated areas like Chicago and Albany, and even inside windswept and vulnerable wild lands like Montana’s Glacier National Park.

I once drove a U-Haul along Yellowstone’s winding roads in my move from New York to California. The sun was bright and the wind was calm, but I was still gripping the steering wheel the whole time. Now imagine a 100-foot long train filled with millions of gallons of explosive crude oil traveling through that same area—in the dead of winter with the wind howling and the snow piling up on the tracks.

Seems like an accident just waiting to happen, right? Unfortunately, it already has, time and again. In fact, more oil spilled from trains last year than in the last four decades. And these spills can be catastrophic. Last July, a crude oil train derailed in Canada, decimating a town and killing 47 people.

Residents rally outside Berkeley City Hall.

Residents rally outside Berkeley City Hall to show opposition to a proposed crude by rail project. .(Photo credit: Mauricio Castillo)

These and other sobering statistics are causing communities to think twice about allowing these exploding trains onto their tracks. This week, the City Council of Berkeley voted unanimously to oppose an oil company’s plans to transport crude oil through their town and other East Bay cities to a new refinery in nearby San Luis Obispo County. The council was backed by several people who showed up before the meeting to protest the crude by rail project.

East Bay resident Margaret Rossoff, who helps support communities in fighting refineries, compared crude by rail to “transporting dynamite.” Shoshanna Howard with the Center for Biological persity described the project as “preposterous,” adding that “We shouldn’t continue feeding into a fossil fuel system that has proven us wrong time and again.” Their concerns were echoed by many other local residents who felt strongly that we are going in the wrong direction by allowing more crude oil transport.

They are not alone.

During the same week, the city council of Richmond, another Bay Area community, also voted to oppose crude-by-rail plans that involved trains running through its city. In early February, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District issued energy company Kinder Morgan a permit to operate its crude-by-rail project, without any notice to the public or environmental and health review. Kinder Morgan is transporting volatile Bakken crude oil to Bay Area refineries using the same unsafe train cars involved in the explosion in Canada. Members of the Richmond community, perhaps even members of the air district’s Board of Directors, did not know that a permit to transport crude oil had been issued for over a month. The community’s opposition is backed by Earthjustice, which on behalf of environmental justice and conservation groups filed a lawsuit against Kinder Morgan and the air district and asked the court to halt operations immediately while the project undergoes a full and transparent review under the California Environmental Quality Act.

On the other side of the country, residents in the county of Albany, New York, feel similarly. Recently, the county halted plans to expand crude-by-rail operations at its port terminal. The news followed pressure by a broad coalition—including community and environmental groups like Earthjustice—against the state Department of Environmental Conservation for its dangerously lax approach to skyrocketing shipments of crude-by-rail into the Port of Albany.

To Big Oil, these communities may look like a place where it can transport millions of barrels of crude oil without drawing too much attention.  But to people living near these tracks, like me and thousands of others, these communities are home. We have a right to know what hazards are moving in next door, a right to participate in decisions that impact our neighborhoods, and a right to health and environmental review of industrial activities before they happen.

We are not alone.