Category Archives: Ethanol

CPC-1232 standard, Crude Oil, DOT-111, Emergency Readiness & Response, Ethanol, Federal Regulation (U.S.), National Transportation Safety Board, Rail routing, Tank car design

Outgoing chair of NTSB: U.S. not prepared, not enough NTSB investigators

Repost from Bloomberg News

Communities Not Prepared for Worst-Case Rail Accidents: NTSB

By Patrick Ambrosio Apr 22, 2014 7:38 AM

Bloomberg BNA — Deborah Hersman, the outgoing chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said April 21 that U.S. communities are not prepared to respond adequately to worst-case accidents involving trains carrying crude oil and ethanol.

Answering questions following her farewell address at the National Press Club in Washington, Hersman said U.S. regulators are behind the curve in addressing the transport of hazardous liquids by rail. She said federal regulations have not been revised to address the increase in rail transport of crude oil and other flammable liquids—an increase of over 440 percent since 2005.

Hersman, who is leaving her post at NTSB April 25 to serve as president of the National Safety Council, said the petroleum industry and first responders don’t have provisions in place to address a worst-case scenario event involving a train carrying crude oil or ethanol. She said several catastrophic accidents have involved crude oil, including a July 2013 train derailment in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, that resulted in 47 fatalities.

The NTSB, in conjunction with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, identified regulatory steps that could be taken by the Transportation Department to address safety risks, including expanded route planning requirements for crude oil shipments, the addition of a requirement for carriers to develop response plans for incidents involving crude oil shipments and increased audits of shippers and carriers to ensure that hazardous liquids are properly classified.

Hersman said the NTSB scheduled a two-day forum to hear from first responders and the petroleum and rail industries on safety issues. The forum, which will be held on April 22-23 in Washington, will include discussions on tank car design, emergency response to releases of flammable liquids and federal oversight of crude oil and ethanol transport, according to an agenda posted on the NTSB’s website.

Tank Car Safety

When asked about the adequacy of the DOT-111 rail tank car to carry crude oil, Hersman reiterated the NTSB’s position that the tank cars are not safe to carry hazardous liquids.

The NTSB recommended in 2009 that all new and existing tank cars in crude oil and ethanol service be equipped with additional safety design features, including enhanced tank head and shell puncture resistance systems, top fittings protection and bottom outlet valves that remain closed during accidents.

“We have said that they are not safe enough to carry hazardous liquids,” Hersman said about the DOT-111 legacy cars. “Carrying corn oil is fine, carrying crude oil is not.”

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and the Federal Railroad Administration is working on a proposed rule to update the federal design standards for DOT-111 rail tank cars used to transport hazardous liquids. The consensus among industry and regulators is that new design standards are needed, but there is disagreement over whether the new safety requirements should be more stringent than the CPC-1232 standard, a voluntary industry standard adopted for all new tank cars ordered after Oct. 1, 2011.

Staffing Limitations Said to Delay Work

NTSB staff needs support from Congress to fulfill their mission, Hersman said. At present, she said the NTSB is involved in more than 20 rail accident investigations but only has “about 10 rail investigators.”

“We’re going to have to turn down accidents that occur in the future because we have too much on our plate.”

Bakken Crude, Derailment, DOT-111, Ethanol, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Public Health, Public Safety, Rail accidents, Rail tanker cars

DOT-111 – the ‘Soda Can’ of tank cars – Long wait for safety rules

Repost from WUWM Milwaukee Public Radio, NPR

The Long Wait On Safety Rules For The ‘Soda Can’ Of Rail Cars

By David Schaper, April 15, 2014
Safety advocates have been pressuring Canadian and U.S. officials to create new safety standards for tank cars and to make old DOT-111s like this one more puncture-resistant.   Nati Harnik AP

Freight trains roll through the Chicago suburb of Barrington, Ill., every day, many pulling older tank cars known as DOT-111s. They’re known as the “soda can” of rail cars, says village President Karen Darch, because their shells are so thin.

Many of the DOT-111s are full of heavy Canadian tar sands crude oil. Some carry ethanol. And more and more of them are loaded with light Bakken crude oil from North Dakota.

“The worry is that if there’s a derailment and the car is punctured, if any of the flammable materials in it … spills out and explodes, it will create a huge fire, as we saw last summer in Lac-Megantic,” Darch says.

The center of that small town in Quebec just north of the U.S. border was incinerated in July after an unattended oil train rolled downhill and derailed. More than 60 of the DOT-111s on that train exploded into flames, killing 47 people. Since then, safety advocates have been pressuring Canadian and U.S. officials to create new safety standards for tank cars and to make the old DOT-111s more puncture-resistant.

But the regulatory authorities have not acted yet — not even after three fiery derailments of oil trains since, all in rural areas in which no one was injured. Darch believes it’s only a matter of time before there is another.

“In towns like ours, it can derail blocks from a high school with 3,000 kids, right by houses, neighborhoods where people are sleeping in the middle of the night. And even with the best response, you’re going to have very catastrophic results,” she says.

And it’s not just those living near railroad tracks who are increasingly concerned.

“The regulatory uncertainty of not having regulations to build new cars to, or not having regulations to modify the current fleet, is starting to adversely impact my industry,” says Tom Simpson, president of the Railway Supply Institute, which represents rail car manufacturers.

Simpson says that since 2011, the industry has been building to a stronger standard on its own, making new tank cars more puncture-resistant. But some are recommending an even stronger standard than that — and there’s some disagreement between manufacturers, oil companies and the railroads over just how robust the new standard should be.

Manufacturers are becoming frustrated, he says.

“We are willing to build new cars to a tougher standard. We are willing to modify the current fleet to a tougher standard to continue to remove the risk of moving hazardous material by rail, but we would not take that step until we are certain that the steps we do take would be approved by the federal government,” Simpson says.

And that lack of momentum was the focus of a Senate subcommittee hearing on the topic last week. Republican Susan Collins of Maine tried to pin down Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx on when the new tank car standards would be ready.

His target date, Foxx said, is “as soon as possible.”

“That’s a frustrating answer,” Collins said.

“I understand. It’s frustrating for me to give it to you,” Foxx said. “But I can promise you, senator, that we are working as hard as we can to get the rule done as quickly as we can.”

When pressed, Foxx says he hopes the new rule will be ready before the end of this year. But that vague response leaves industry groups, safety advocates and community leaders somewhere they don’t want to be: in oil tank car limbo.

Ethanol, Kinder Morgan, Oil Industry

Market analyst: Kinder Morgan switched from ethanol to crude “late last year”

Repost from PLATTS McGraw Hill Financial

More ethanol-to-crude rail facility conversions unlikely in California: analyst

Orlando, Florida (Platts)–24Mar2014

More conversions of California ethanol rail unloading terminals to crude service are unlikely, following Kinder Morgan’s switch of its Richmond, California, unloading facility, an analyst said Monday.

“The other big [ethanol] terminals aren’t as close to refiners, and there is a limited amount of ethanol capacity,” Stillwater Associates President David Hackett said on the sidelines of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida.

Kinder Morgan late last year converted the terminal to crude service from ethanol service “after changes in the ethanol market made it attractive for us to look to other commodities,” spokeswoman Melissa Ruiz said Monday in an email.

The Richmond terminal is the only 100-car unit train crude-by-rail facility in California, she said.

“In order to handle crude oil, we had to file a new application with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMA) for permits, which we received last summer,” she said. “We began handling crude this past September, and the facility will serve Bay Area refiners.”

The terminal is located on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail yard in Richmond. The railed crude is trucked from the terminal, she said, noting that there are no pipelines or tank connections involved.

Ruiz declined to comment on the terminal’s current throughput or on which types of crude are received by the facility.

The rail terminal conversion comes after the leading US midstream company early last year scrapped its high-profile proposed Texas-to-California Freedom Pipeline on a lack of customer interest. The pipeline would have delivered 277,000 b/d of crude from the Permian Basin in West Texas to northern and southern California refining complexes.

Kinder Morgan said at the time that it would focus on providing crude-by-rail options for West Coast and Texas shippers.

Along the West Coast, refiners and midstream companies are planning to construct crude-by-rail unloading terminals, but are facing permitting delays opposition.

If California “doesn’t get crude by rail, their competitiveness will erode,” Hackett said during the Platts Barrel Talk panel discussion at the conference. “We do see some uptick in rail deliveries, but there is a lot of opposition to crude by rail in California with the environmental community.”

–Bridget Hunsucker, Edited by Katharine Fraser

Bay Area Refineries, California Regulation, Environmental Impacts, Ethanol, Risk Assessment, Spill prevention and response

SF Chron: flood of oil tank cars “potential environmental disasters on wheels”

Repost from The San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com

Lots of oil in rail tank cars about to be coming to Bay Area

Phillip Matier And Andrew Ross
Sunday, March 23, 2014

FILE - In this Aug. 8, 2012 file photo, DOT-111 and AAR-211 class rail tankers pass by on the background as a man works at the Union Pacific rail yard in Council Bluffs, Iowa. DOT-111 rail cars being used to ship crude oil from North Dakota's Bakken region are an "unacceptable public risk," and even cars voluntarily upgraded by the industry may not be sufficient, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board said Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2014. The cars were involved in derailments of oil trains in Casselton, N.D., and Lac-Megantic, Quebec, just across the U.S. border, NTSB member Robert Sumwalt said at a House Transportation subcommittee hearing. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik, File) Photo: Nati Harnik, Associated Press

FILE – In this Aug. 8, 2012 file photo, DOT-111 and AAR-211 class rail tankers pass by on the background as a man works at the Union Pacific rail yard in Council Bluffs, Iowa.  DOT-111 rail cars being used to ship crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken region are an “unacceptable public risk,” and even cars voluntarily upgraded by the industry may not be sufficient, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board said Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2014.  The cars were involved in derailments of oil trains in Casselton, N.D., and Lac-Megantic, Quebec, just across the U.S. border, NTSB member Robert Sumwalt said at a House Transportation subcommittee hearing.  (AP Photo/Nati Harnik, File)  Photo: Nati Harnik, Associated Press.

Oil is flooding into the Bay Area – in rail tank cars that amount to potential environmental disasters on wheels.

In 2011, about 9,000 tank cars filled with crude oil were shipped into California by rail. In the next two years, thanks to the oil boom in North Dakota and Canada, the number is expected to jump to more than 200,000, according to the California Energy Commission.

About 10 percent of the oil will be headed to the five Bay Area refineries, which means traveling through Contra Costa and Solano counties. The question is, are we prepared to handle the spills or fires if there is a derailment?

“No,” said state Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, after listening to 2 1/2 hours of testimony from emergency responders the other day at a hearing in Sacramento.

In a nutshell, the state has plenty of money for responding to waterborne accidents like the Cosco Busan oil spill in the bay in 2007 – but virtually nothing for handling spills on land.

“It’s not that crude oil is any more dangerous than ethanol or other products that we currently see on the rails,” said Chief Jeff Carman of the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District. “It’s just that with the sheer volume that will be coming in, we are going to see more accidents.”

First on the scene of any accident is likely to be the local fire department – but in Contra Costa and Solano, some agencies have closed fire stations in recent years or reduced the number of personnel per shift to deal with budget cuts.

Contra Costa Fire, for example, is down to 75 on-duty firefighters a day to cover 400 square miles and 600,000 people, compared with the 90 firefighters a day just two years ago.

To give an idea of the potential scale of an accident, the amount of oil that spilled from the Cosco Busan equals about 1 1/2 tank cars of crude. A full train could carry 60 times that amount.

“There is a potential for very serious problems and very disastrous problems,” Hill said.

San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross appear Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays. Matier can be seen on the KPIX TV morning and evening news. He can also be heard on KCBS radio Monday through Friday at 7:50 a.m. and 5:50 p.m. Got a tip? Call (415) 777-8815, or e-mail matierandross@sfchronicle.com.