Category Archives: Explosion

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Derailment, DOT-111, Emergency Readiness & Response, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Hazmat notification, Local Regulation, Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Rail inspection, Rail routing, Tank car design, Train speed

NRDC – It Could Happen Here: The Exploding Threat of Crude by Rail in California

Repost from Natural Resources Defense Council
[Editor: Excellent resources….  Be sure to see the downloadable fact sheet and blast zone maps for Bakersfield, Benicia, Davis, Martinez, Pittsburg, Richmond and Sacramento that follow below this article.  – RS]

It Could Happen Here: The Exploding Threat of Crude by Rail in California

Diane Bailey  |  June 18, 2014

Key Points

  • More crude oil was transported by rail in North America in 2013 than in the past five years combined. Millions of Californians live near crude-by-rail routes and could face extreme safety risks.
  • Federal regulators have few safeguards in place to protect communities and the environment from accidents, spills and explosions resulting from the race to move millions of barrels of crude by rail.
  • NRDC calls on lawmakers to expedite rules mandating commonsense practices, including removal of defective tank cars, rerouting around sensitive areas, and requiring disclosure regarding the content of all shipments and relevant risks to local residents.
  • Nearly four million Bay Area and Central/San Joaquin Valley residents are at increased risk from oil train accidents occurring with the proliferation of new crude by rail terminal proposals. But dangerous crude oil train derailments are preventable if the mandatory safety measures NRDC recommends are enacted.

Soda cans on wheels. That’s what some call the dangerous rail tank cars that have suddenly become ubiquitous across the American landscape. In the rush to transport land-locked unconventional new crude oil sources, old rail lines running through communities across America are now rattling with thousands of cars filled with crude oil. Neither the cars nor the railroads were built for this purpose. Worse, federal regulators have few safeguards in place to protect communities and the environment from accidents, spills and explosions resulting from the race to move millions of barrels of crude by rail.

More crude oil was transported by rail in North America in 2013 than in the past five years combined, most of it extracted from the Bakken shale of North Dakota and Montana. In California, the increase in crude by rail has been particularly dramatic, from 45,000 barrels in 2009 to 6 million barrels in 2013. As “rolling pipelines” of more than 100 rail cars haul millions of gallons of crude oil through our communities, derailments, oil spills and explosions are becoming all too common. Between March 2013 and May 2014, there were 12 significant oil train derailments in the United States and Canada. As oil companies profit, communities bear the cost.

Californians Living Near Crude By Rail Routes

A new report from the State of California Interagency Rail Safety Working Group outlines serious vulnerabilities along California rail lines including close proximity to many population centers, numerous earthquake faults, a shortage of adequate emergency response capacity, many areas of vulnerable natural resources, and a number of “high hazard areas” for derailments, which are generally located along waterways and fragile natural resource areas. Millions of Californians live near crude by rail routes and could face extreme safety risks. Currently, there are five major new crude by rail terminals in the planning stages and two recently converted crude oil rail terminals that could collectively bring in up to seven or more mile long trains each day through metropolitan areas like Sacramento, putting up to 3.8 million people in harm’s way.

Explosions and Spills Threaten Lives

“Each tank car of crude holds the energy equivalent of 2 million sticks of dynamite or the fuel in a widebody jetliner,” write Russell Gold and Betsy Morris in the Wall Street Journal. In July 2013, an unattended oil train carrying 72 carloads of crude oil from North Dakota exploded in the center of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, near the U.S. border. The resulting inferno killed 47 people and destroyed much of the town center. Some 1.6 million gallons of crude oil was spilled. In the months following this devastating event, several more North American oil train derailments illustrated the sobering recurring public safety and environmental threats of catastrophic derailments due to the virtually unregulated surge in crude by rail. In 2013, rail cars spilled more crude oil than nearly the previous four decades combined (1.14 million gallons in 2013 compared to 800,000 gallons from 1975 to 2012).

Communities Lack Information And Control Over Hazardous Rail Shipments

Municipalities across the country are demanding increased communication about rail shipments of crude oil through their communities. However, crude oil — and other hazardous materials shipped by rail — have been exempted from the disclosure requirement of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA). While the federal government finally directed rail companies to disclose this critical information to emergency responders, the general public remains in the dark about the nature of mile long tanker trains hurtling through their backyards at dangerous speed. Nobody has a choice about what gets transported through their community, how dangerous the cargo is, how frequently it goes through or whether it could be rerouted to more remote areas. Of the more than 3.8 million Californians who will be put at risk by proposed new crude by rail terminals, most are unlikely to even be aware of the significant new risks that they face.

Outdated and Dangerous Tank Cars Are Used to Carry Crude

Most of the rail tank cars used to carry flammable liquids, including crude oil are old “DOT-111s,” which are widely known to be unsafe. Speaking at a farewell address at the National Press Club in April 2014, outgoing National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chairwoman Deborah Hersman repeated a long-held NTSB position that unmodified DOT-111 tank cars — non-pressurized rail tank cars that accident investigators report are easily punctured or ruptured during a derailment — are not safe to carry hazardous liquids. “Carrying corn oil is fine, carrying crude oil is not,” she said.

Thus, in 2009, the NTSB recommended these tank cars be equipped with additional safety features. Since October 2011, new rail tank cars built for transporting crude oil have incorporated these features, such as the use of head shields, thicker tank material, and pressure-relief devices. Yet regulators have not eliminated the use of the older, unmodified DOT-111 cars for carrying oil — out of 39,000 DOT-111 tank cars now used to carry crude, two-thirds still do not meet these modern safety standards. The Department of Transportation, simply recommended that shippers stop using these cars to transport oil, but they do not require it.

Commonsense Safeguards for Crude-by-Rail Are Overdue

In the longer term, our health depends on cleaner, renewable energy and moving away from fossil fuels. In the immediate term, we must tighten safety regulations on the rail transport of crude oil, or run the risk of devastating consequences. NRDC calls on lawmakers to expedite rules mandating commonsense practices, including but not limited to the following:

  1. Remove Defective, Dangerous Tankers from Crude by Rail Service: The existing fleet of dangerous DOT-111 tank cars must be taken out of crude oil service immediately.
  2. Impose Safer Speed Limits: Crude oil unit trains must adhere to speed limits that significantly reduce the possibility of an explosion in the event of a derailment.
  3. Reroute Around Sensitive Areas: The National Transportation Safety Board recommendation that crude oil trains avoid heavily populated areas and otherwise sensitive areas must become mandatory.
  4. Require Disclosure: Information regarding the content of all shipments and relevant risks and emergency procedures should be made accessible to local residents.
  5. Provide Emergency Responder Resources: States should assess fees on shippers and carriers to fully cover the costs of providing emergency response services and safeguarding the public from oil trains, and ensure that there is adequate emergency response capacity.
  6. Make Additional Operational Safety and Oversight Improvements: Unit trains of crude oil and other hazardous materials should be placed in the highest risk category of Hazmat shipments; and many other operational improvements should be made. Additional inspections of crude oil trains are also critical, including the funding necessary for more rail safety personnel.
  7. Exercise Local Government Powers:
    • Local governments and states can require cumulative risk analysis of crude oil rail infrastructure and increased rail traffic.
    • Local governments should thoroughly evaluate all of the environmental and public health and safety risks of crude oil rail terminals that require land use permits or other forms of local approval.
    • Local governments should reject any new crude oil rail terminals within one mile of sensitive sites such as homes, schools, daycares, and hospitals.

Crude oil train accidents are preventable. All Californians should be calling for the crude oil and rail safety standards listed here.

Read More…

Fact Sheet (PDF)

portable document format

Maps: Crude Oil Train
Derailment Risk Zones
in California

Bakken Crude, DEIR, Derailment, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Hazardous cargo transparency, Keystone XL, U.S. Department of Transportation

The dark side of the oil boom – analysis of federal data from more than 400 oil-train incidents since 1971

Repost from Politico

The dark side of the oil boom

By Kathryn A. Wolfe and Bob King | 6/18/14

Communities throughout the U.S. and Canada are waking up to the dark side of North America’s energy boom: Trains hauling crude oil are crashing, exploding and spilling in record numbers as a fast-growing industry outpaces the federal government’s oversight.

In the 11 months since a runaway oil train derailed in the middle of a small town in Quebec, incinerating 47 people, the rolling virtual pipelines have unleashed crude oil into an Alabama swamp, forced more than 1,000 North Dakota residents to evacuate, dangled from a bridge in Philadelphia and smashed into an industrial building near Pittsburgh. The latest serious accident was April’s fiery crash in Lynchburg, Virginia, where even the mayor had been unaware oil was rolling through his city.

(WATCH: News coverage of recent oil train spills)

A POLITICO analysis of federal data from more than 400 oil-train incidents since 1971 shows that a once-uncommon threat has escalated dramatically in the past five years:

  • This year has already shattered the record for property damage from U.S. oil-train accidents, with a toll exceeding $10 million through mid-May — nearly triple the damage for all of 2013. The number of incidents so far this year — 70 — is also on pace to set a record.
  • Almost every region of the U.S. has been touched by an oil-train incident. These episodes are spreading as more refineries take crude from production hot spots like North Dakota’s Bakken region and western Canada, while companies from California and Washington state to Missouri, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida build or expand terminals for moving oil from trains to barges, trucks or pipelines.
  • The voluntary reforms that DOT and industry have enacted so far might not have prevented the worst accidents. For example, the department announced a voluntary 40 mph speed limit this year for oil trains traveling through densely populated areas, but DOT’s hazardous-incident database shows only one accident in the past five years involving speeds exceeding that threshold. And unlike Canada’s transportation ministry, DOT has not yet set a mandatory deadline for companies to replace or upgrade their tank cars.

Starting this month, DOT is requiring railroads to share more timely information with state emergency managers about the trains’ cargoes and routes. But some railroads are demanding that states sign confidentiality agreements, citing security risks.

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx says each step is a move in the right direction.

“There’s been such exponential growth in the excavation of this crude oil that it’s basically outrun our normal systems,” Foxx said in an interview. But Foxx, who became secretary four days before the Quebec disaster, added: “We’ve been focused on this since I came in. … We’re going to get this right.”

Defending the voluntary speed limits, Foxx said: “You have to understand that all these pieces fit together. So a stronger tank car with lower speeds is safer than a less strong tank car at higher speeds.”

Members of Congress are joining the call for more action.

“The boom in domestic oil production has turned many railways and small communities across our country into de facto oil pipelines, and the gold-rush-type phenomenon has unfortunately put our regulators behind the eight ball,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has been pushing for stricter safety and disclosure rules. “It has become abundantly clear that there are a whole slew of freight rail safety measures that, while for many years have been moving through the gears of bureaucracy, must now be approved and implemented in haste.”

Sierra Club staff attorney Devorah Ancel said the rising damage toll should “ring alarm bells in the minds of our decision-makers, from cities all the way up to Congress and the president.”

“Our fear is that the regulators are being pushed over by the industry,” she said.

Like the oil boom itself, the surge in oil-train traffic has come much faster than anyone expected. Meanwhile, the trains face less onerous regulations than other ways of moving oil, including pipelines like TransCanada’s Keystone XL project.

Keystone, which would carry oil from Alberta to the Gulf Coast, has waited more than five years for a permit from the Obama administration while provoking a national debate about climate change. But no White House approval was needed for all the trains carrying Canadian oil into the United States. In fact, freight railroads in the U.S. are considered “common carriers” for hazardous materials, meaning they can’t refuse to ship it as long as it meets federal guidelines.

The oil-trains issue is bringing a flurry of foot traffic to the White House Office of Management and Budget these days as railroad and oil industry representatives press their case on what any new regulations should look like. Representatives of the country’s leading hauler of Bakken crude, Warren Buffett’s BNSF Railway, met with OMB regulatory chief Howard Shelanski on June 3 and June 6, and joined people from railroads including CSX, Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern in another meeting June 10.

DOT says it has been working to address the problem since as far back as September 2012, and that efforts accelerated after Foxx took over in July. His chief of staff, Sarah Feinberg, holds a meeting each morning on the issue, and she and Foxx meet regularly with top leadership at the two key DOT agencies that oversee railroads and the transport of hazardous materials.

The voluntary agreements that Foxx’s department has worked out with the freight rail industry and shippers address issues like track inspections, speed limits, brakes and additional signaling equipment. Those are all “relevant when dealing with reducing risk” from oil train traffic, the freight rail industry’s main trade group said in a statement.

“The number one and two causes of all main track accidents are track or equipment related,” the Association of American Railroads said. The statement added, “That is how the industry came up with the steps in the voluntary agreement in February aimed at reducing risks of these kinds of accidents when moving crude oil by rail.”

Meanwhile, the oil train business is primed to get bigger. Even TransCanada might start using rail to ship oil to the U.S. while waiting for Keystone to get the green light, CEO Russ Girling said in an interview in May — despite agreeing that trains are a costlier and potentially more dangerous option.

“If anybody thinks that is a better idea, that’s delusional,” Girling said.

In fact, the State Department estimated this month that because of the risks of rail compared with pipelines, an additional 189 injuries and 28 deaths would occur every year if trains end up carrying the oil intended for Keystone.

But environmentalists who warn about the dangers of crude-by-rail say it would be wrong to turn the issue into an excuse to approve Keystone. For one thing, the Texas-bound pipeline would replace only part of the train traffic, which has spread its tendrils all across the U.S. “There are no pipelines that run from North Dakota to the West Coast,” the Sierra Club’s Ancel said.

 

Bakken Crude, Derailment, Explosion, Keystone XL, Rail accidents, Rail Safety, Rail vs. Pipeline, US Dept of Energy

Government numbers on crude-oil train safety don’t add up

Repost from The Sacramento Bee

Government numbers on crude-oil train safety don’t add up

By Curtis Tate McClatchy Newspapers  |  Monday, Jun. 16, 2014
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A train carrying tanker cars filled with crude oil passes through St. Paul, Minnesota, on February 27, 2013. The crude oil is loaded in at terminals in North Dakota and Canada and taken to refineries in the east. Jim Gehrz / Minneapolis Star Tribune/MCT

WASHINGTON — The State Department projects 28 more fatalities and 189 more injuries a year if crude oil moves by rail instead of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

Sounds bad, but is it true?

The railroad industry and its Washington regulators boast that more than 99.99 percent of hazardous materials rail shipments reach their destinations safely.

Sounds good, but is it good enough?

The debate over moving the nation’s surging oil production by rail has generated a heated debate, and some impressive-sounding numbers that both sides have used to bolster their cases.

On closer scrutiny, however, some of those numbers don’t add up.

Earlier this month, the State Department increased its earlier projections of injuries and fatalities if Keystone XL’s 830,000 barrels a day were to move by rail. Major media organizations and pipeline supporters framed the new numbers as a downside to not building the controversial project.

But the department’s detailed explanation for its revisions shows why the numbers don’t really reveal anything about the risks of transporting crude oil by rail.

In its January Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for the proposed 1,700-mile pipeline, the department calculated the rail impacts of the no-build scenario based on a decade of Federal Railroad Administration accident statistics. The analysis used the annual rate of injuries and fatalities per million ton-miles, a common measure of rail traffic, from 2002 to 2012.

An error report published June 6 said the original analysis underreported the potential injuries and fatalities “due to an error in search parameters used.” However, the report’s authors concede that their calculations don’t actually measure the risk of shipping crude oil. Large volumes of crude oil weren’t shipped by rail until 2011.

The 10-year injury and fatality rates were instead derived from accidents that involved trains carrying every type of cargo that moves by rail, from coal and grain to french fries and auto parts.

“Because the dataset does not distinguish petroleum or crude oil rail transportation from that of other cargo,” the department wrote, “these incident rates are not directly correlated to the type of product/commodity being transported.”

The State Department’s analysis does measure potential injuries and fatalities if more trains are put on the tracks. But that isn’t terribly useful, either, because while crude oil shipments have surged, other commodities have declined.

Changes in the economy and environmental rules mean there are considerably fewer trains of coal, long the industry’s mainstay. According to the Association of American Railroads, the industry’s leading advocacy group, railroads moved 13,000 fewer trainloads of coal in 2012 than they did in 2008.

Moving oil by rail instead of Keystone XL would add about 4,380 trains a year, only a third of the lost coal traffic.

Fred W. Frailey, a journalist who’s covered railroads for decades and is widely regarded as the dean of writers on that subject, questioned the State Department’s analysis.

“It strikes me as totally meaningless,” he said. “It doesn’t speak at all to the danger of hauling oil.”

A spokeswoman for the department declined to comment about the report.

As several derailments involving crude oil trains made headlines in the past year, the industry has repeatedly defended its safety record. But what’s on the other side of that 99.99 percent?

According to industry figures, railroads moved 400,000 carloads of crude oil in 2013, up from fewer than 10,000 five years earlier. With each tank car carrying 30,000 gallons, that’s about 12 billion gallons last year.

A McClatchy analysis of oil spill data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration in January showed that about 1.2 million gallons of crude oil spilled from trains in 2013 _ more than the previous 38 years combined.

If only 1.2 million of the 12 billion gallons spilled, that’s a safety record of 99.99 percent.

The country experienced two major crude-oil derailments last year. A derailment near Aliceville, Ala., in November released 748,000 gallons into a wetland. Another just after Christmas spilled 475,000 gallons near Casselton, N.D.

But the total excludes spills outside U.S. borders, even if the cargo originated domestically. More than 1.5 million gallons of North Dakota crude oil spilled in last July’s catastrophic and deadly derailment in Lac-Megantic, Quebec. The fiery accident killed 47 people and leveled much of the center of the lakeside resort town.

At the end of a two-day National Transportation Safety Board rail-safety forum in April, board member Robert Sumwalt, who spent 24 years in aviation, told the rail industry that its much-touted safety record was nothing to brag about.

“You’re in a business where that’s not good enough,” Sumwalt said.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/06/16/6487565/government-numbers-on-crude-oil.html#storylink

 

Air Quality, Bakken Shale, Crude By Rail, DEIR, Derailment, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Valero Benicia Refinery, Valero Energy Corporation

Bloomberg News – Valero Oil-by-Rail Plan Has ‘Unavoidable’ Air Impacts, City Says

Repost from Bloomberg News

Valero Oil-by-Rail Plan Has ‘Unavoidable’ Air Impacts, City Says

By Lynn Doan Jun 17, 2014

Valero Energy Corp. (VLO)’s plan to unload as many as 70,000 barrels of oil a day from trains at its Benicia refinery will increase emissions across California in a “significant and unavoidable” way, a city report shows.

Valero has applied to build a rail-offloading rack at the plant northeast of San Francisco that would take oil from as many as 100 tanker cars a day. The San Antonio-based company delayed the project’s completion by a year to early 2015 as it awaits approval from the city.

“Project-related trains would generate locomotive emissions in the Bay Area Basin, the Sacramento Basin, and other locations in North America,” the city of Benicia said in an environmental assessment posted on its website today. “The city has no jurisdiction to impose any emission controls on the tanker car locomotives; therefore, there is no feasible mitigation available to reduce this significant impact to a less-than-significant level.”

Valero is proposing the rail spur as record volumes of oil are extracted from North American shale formations that the U.S. West Coast has little pipeline access to. California’s refiners are already bringing in the biggest-ever volumes of oil by rail as they seek to displace shrinking supplies of crude within the state and from Alaska.

A series of explosions and derailments of trains carrying crude, including one in Quebec that killed 47 people in July, touched off a flood of letters to the city of Benicia about Valero’s project and compelled the planning commission to put off a decision until an environmental study could be done.

New Rules

Regulators in both the U.S. and Canada are imposing new rules designed to improve the safety of trains carrying oil and a group of California agencies released a report June 10 recommending ways in which the state should respond.

Earlier this month, the city council in Vancouver, Washington, voted to oppose a proposal by Tesoro Corp. (TSO) and Savage Cos. to build a 360,000-barrel-a-day, rail-to-marine complex at the Port of Vancouver.

Valero’s Benicia project would probably result in a spill of more than 100 gallons once every 111 years, according to an analysis conducted as part of the city’s environmental report. The report was prepared by researchers at the University of Illinois’s Rail Transportation and Engineering Center in Urbana, Illinois.

California’s refiners received 557,315 barrels of oil by rail in April, the most ever for that month, state Energy Commission data show. Crude from Canada made up 45 percent of the state’s total rail receipts. Oil from North Dakota accounted for 22 percent.

’Challenged’ Market

Valero has described refining in the western U.S as “a challenged market” with margins close to break-even when all of the region’s plants are running normally. Profits from the 132,000-barrel-a-day Benicia refinery are particularly under pressure, Joe Gorder, the company’s president and chief executive officer, said in a presentation May 21.

The plant “produces a significant yield of gasoline, which, of course, we’ve seen the margins compressed on and demand not be the greatest on,” Gorder said at the UBS Global Oil and Gas Conference in Austin, Texas. Sourcing alternative crudes on the West Coast “would increase the economics out there for us substantially,” he said.

Spot California-grade diesel has traded about 3.5 cents a gallon above gasoline in Los Angeles this year and averaged an 8.75-cent premium in 2013, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

To contact the reporter on this story: Lynn Doan in San Francisco at ldoan6@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Marino at dmarino4@bloomberg.net Charlotte Porter