Category Archives: Federal Regulation (U.S.)

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, CSX, Derailment, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Oil spill, State regulation, Tank car design, Water quality

CSX reimburses Lynchburg $107,853; Virginia regulators negotiating further penalties

Repost from The Richmond Times-Dispatch

State regulators expect penalty for CSX oil train wreck

April CSX wreck sent oil into river at Lynchburg
By Alicia Petska, The News & Advance, August 21, 2014 10:30 pm

LYNCHBURG — State environmental regulators are in talks with CSX to negotiate the terms of a consent order that will be issued in response to the estimated 29,916 gallons of oil released into the James River during the April 30 train derailment in downtown Lynchburg.

The order is expected to include a financial penalty, but the amount has not been determined yet, said Robert Weld, regional director for the Department of Environmental Quality.

Other measures may include long-term monitoring of river conditions and replanting vegetative buffers along the riverbank.

Water quality testing in the weeks after the derailment found no contaminants of concern, Weld said, but visual checks and other monitoring will continue out of an “abundance of caution.”

It remains unclear just how much of the Bakken crude oil that leaked during the downtown derailment actually mixed into the river or made its way downstream.

Much of it burned in the large fire that erupted after 17 cars on a 105-car oil train derailed near downtown Lynchburg. Three cars tumbled over the riverbank, and one ruptured. There were no injuries or building damage.

The incident drew Lynchburg into a national debate over how to safely ship the volatile crude found in Bakken shale around North Dakota, where production has skyrocketed in recent years.

On Wednesday, Weld was among more than a dozen state officials who convened in Lynchburg for the second meeting of a new rail safety task force formed by Gov. Terry McAuliffe after the derailment.

The meeting, held at City Hall, included a presentation from the federal agency charged with regulating hazmat shipments and public comments from environmental advocates and rail employee representatives.

CSX had offered to reimburse the city for the cost of its emergency response and sent the final check last week, according to Lynchburg’s finance department.

The reimbursement totaled $107,853 for personnel and equipment costs, as well as minor property damage to trees, curbs and sidewalks.

The new rail safety task force has been asked to advise the state on how it can improve its own preparedness and response efforts.

It also might weigh in on the federal regulations that govern most aspects of rail operations. The U.S. Department of Transportation has been studying the oil-by-rail issue since a deadly oil train derailment in Quebec in July 2013.

Last month, federal officials released a set of proposed rules that may lead to phasing out older DOT-111 model tankers that have been criticized as puncture prone.

There also may be higher standards for braking systems, speed limits and testing of volatile liquids. The proposed rules are in a 60-day public comment period that will end Sept. 30.

During a public hearing Wednesday, water quality advocates with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and James River Association urged officials to take a comprehensive look at the rail safety issue and not limit themselves to one region, cargo or issue.

The proposed federal regulations may not do anything to deter the kind of derailment that occurred in Lynchburg, said Pat Calvert of the James River Association, whose office is close to the derailment site.

Given the location of the derailment — near several downtown businesses and a popular trail system — it’s a miracle no one was injured, he said.

“We dodged a bullet,” Calvert said. “But we shouldn’t necessarily be playing Russian roulette here.”

The cause of the Lynchburg derailment is under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB said it could be a year or more before its report is ready.

The state’s rail safety task force plans to hold its next meeting in September in the Norfolk area. It hopes to tour the Yorktown oil refinery — where oil-by-rail shipments through Virginia end up — and meet with a representative of the NTSB.

Bakken Crude, Canadian regulation, Crude By Rail, DOT-111, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Tank car design

U.S. lags in dealing with danger of oil tank cars

Repost from CentralMaine.com

OUR OPINION: US lags in dealing with danger of oil tank cars

Federal foot-dragging could lead to a Lac-Megantic-type tragedy in this country.
August 20, 2014

A major milestone was reached this week in the follow-up to the oil train explosion that killed 47 people last summer in Lac-Megantic, Quebec: Canadian investigators released a final report blaming lax government oversight and poor rail company safety practices for the tragic accident.

But although the Canadian government obviously didn’t fulfill its regulatory responsibilities, Canada is still way ahead of the United States in taking steps to prevent another such tragedy. Canada has banned the most decrepit tank cars; Washington, meanwhile, is calling for a drawn-out retirement and retrofitting process that could keep some of the cars in service until at least 2017. This reluctance to take action is putting U.S. communities so far down the track in terms of improved public safety that they’re almost guaranteed to be left behind.

The train that crashed in Quebec in July 2013 was carrying nearly 2 million gallons of volatile North Dakota crude oil in DOT-111 tanker cars. When derailed, DOT-111 cars are easily punctured or ruptured, making them highly vulnerable to leaks and explosions. The cars’ flaws were first noted in a National Transportation Safety Board study more than 20 years ago. And in 2012, the NTSB concluded that the DOT-111s’ “inadequate design” contributed to the severity of a 2009 oil train derailment in Illinois that killed one person and injured several others. Because of a spike in U.S. crude oil production, moreover, the number of oil car accidents continues to climb: 116 in 2013, more than double the number of all episodes from 1990 to 2009.

Nonetheless, about 98,000 tank cars are in service — and most don’t have the latest safety features. All 72 cars in the Quebec runaway train, for example, were built to the older standard. So any of the major cities through which this train passed before reaching Lac-Megantic — including Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago and Detroit — could have been the site of an equally devastating derailment, spill and explosion.

In April, Canada barred 5,000 of the most poorly made, puncture-prone DOT-111s from carrying crude oil and ethanol. But such cars will stay in service in the United States until at least 2017, under proposed regulations that call for a two-year phase-out of the cars, effective September 2015, unless they’re retrofitted to comply with new safety standards.

Announced last month by the federal Department of Transportation, the rules would apply only to “high-hazard flammable trains” that carry at least 20 cars of volatile liquids. DOT-111s that haven’t been retrofitted still could be used beyond 2015 on trains with 19 or fewer tank cars — a massive loophole.

The U.S. DOT realizes it’s dangerous to keep shipping volatile crude in substandard rail cars. The agency even said as much in the news release announcing the proposal: “The safety risk presented by transporting Bakken (North Dakota) crude oil by rail is magnified both by an increasing volume of Bakken being shipped … throughout the U.S. and the large distances over which the product is shipped.”

To have this knowledge and still fail to act on it is to take a cynical view of the well-being of the people whom the agency is supposed to be protecting — and it gives public service a bad name.

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, DOT-111, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Take Action

Bainbridge Island Review Guest Opinion: Why I blockaded an oil train

Repost from the Bainbridge Island Review

GUEST OPINION: Why I blockaded an oil train

BY ANNETTE KLAPSTEIN, August 16, 2014

On Monday, July 28, I joined Jan Woodruff of Anacortes and Adam Gaya of Seattle in locking ourselves to barrels full of concrete on the rail spur into the Tesoro refinery in Anacortes in order to keep an oil train from leaving the refinery.

Why would a 62-year-old retired lawyer and long-time resident of Bainbridge Island take such a drastic action?

The short answer is: I could not do otherwise.

This kind of resistance may seem extreme, but these are extreme times — these oil trains present an imminent threat to the lives and safety of tens of thousands of our friends and neighbors, and our politicians have done a woefully inadequate job of addressing this.

The puncture-prone DOT-111 tanker cars were deemed “inadequate” by federal authorities more than 20 years ago. Yet every week, more than a dozen of these trains travel through downtown Seattle to refineries including Tesoro.

These trains are carrying Bakken shale crude, which the DOT has warned is unusually volatile and can catch fire at temperatures as low as 75 degrees F!

There have been very frequent derailments, including one in Seattle last week (headed for the Tesoro refinery), which occurred despite a train speed of only 5 miles per hour. Had it been going much faster, the results would likely have been catastrophic.

There have been five explosions and massive fires associated with derailments within the past year, the worst being at Lac-Megantic, Quebec, where a derailment caused a massive explosion, leveling several city blocks and vaporizing 47 people. If this happens in Seattle near the sports stadiums during a Seahawks or Mariners game, tens of thousands of people will die a horrific death.

Tesoro had a terrible safety record even before the huge increase in oil-by-rail.

After its tragic 2010 fire, which killed seven workers, it was found to have committed 39 “willful” and five “serious” violations of safety regulations.

Tesoro is planning to build the massive Tesoro Savage Vancouver Oil Terminal, a project so fraught with potential problems that the Vancouver City Council has asked Governor Inslee to reject it.

The United States Supreme Court, in its questionable wisdom, has declared corporations to be “persons” with human rights. If Tesoro and the other oil companies trying to turn our beautiful state of Washington into the Bakken shale oil dealer to the world are “persons” it is terribly clear to me what sort of “persons” they are: psychopaths — lacking all conscience or empathy. If any other group of people exposed us to such risks, they’d be locked up as the criminals they are. Instead, we get cheap bromides about “safe fracking,” while wells across the country are poisoned and billions of gallons of water in drought-stricken California are ruined: all for cheap dirty energy, in an era when the ravages of climate change are becoming increasingly visible.

The fires in Washington last week were one small sample of ominous things to come. In under a week of the official fire season, more area was burned than in any full year of the past decade. If we do not take drastic measures to address climate change immediately, our children and grandchildren will have to live through the collapse of our civilization within decades. I cannot live with that on my conscience.

And what has our political leadership offered to address these issues? Feeble and half-hearted actions such as the federal plan to “phase out” the most unsafe oil-by-rail cars over the next four years.

In four years we are certain to have more disasters and more deaths — such a plan is criminally negligent and absolutely unacceptable.

We need a total ban on all shipment of Bakken crude by rail NOW, and a complete halt to the development of any new oil terminals in the Pacific Northwest.

The oil companies have no sense of responsibility to anything but their bottom lines. Companies that make decisions like this have no place doing business on our increasingly fragile planet, and we the people of the state of Washington have to draw the line.

Annette Klapstein is a Bainbridge Island resident and a retired attorney who worked for the Puyallup Indian Tribe for 21 years, primarily on fisheries issues.
Bakken Crude, DOT-111, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Light sweet crude, Oil stabilization, Volatility

Transp. secretary says ‘risk level is higher’ for Bakken crude transport

Repost from Dakota Resource Council
[Editor: Fascinating quotes from a variety of industry reps and North Dakota elected representatives, all scrambling to protect commercial interests.  They would like everyone to stop using the word “Bakken” to describe Bakken crude.  Wow, that should help a lot!  Secretary Foxx dances around the subject while maintaining the DOT’s finding that Bakken crude is more volatile and a higher risk.  – RS]

Transportation secretary says ‘risk level is higher’ for Bakken crude transport

By: Mike Nowatzki, Forum News Service, August 8, 2014

BISMARCK – U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said Friday that crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken shale formation isn’t being singled out from other crudes in proposed new tank car standards, but he didn’t say definitively whether the Department of Transportation believes it’s more volatile than other light, sweet crudes.“

We’re seeing some light ends in the Bakken crude that suggests a higher level of volatility than we would see in typical crude,” Foxx said in a press conference after Friday’s meeting in Bismarck on national energy policy. “Of course, typical crude is a wide range of different, other types of crude.”

Earlier this week, industry representatives and members of the North Dakota Industrial Commission, including Gov. Jack Dalrymple, questioned why an analysis by the DOT’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration singled out Bakken crude as being more volatile and riskier to transport than other U.S. crudes. A North Dakota Petroleum Council-commissioned study released Monday yielded similar data as the PHMSA study but found Bakken crude to be consistent with other types of light, sweet crude.

Dalrymple had said he planned to ask Foxx to explain, and the governor dove right into the topic when he took to the podium before Foxx during Friday’s Quadrennial Energy Review meeting at Bismarck State College.

“We are curious why the recent studies from the federal government have referred specifically to Bakken crude oil,” Dalrymple said to the crowd of more than 200 people at the National Energy Center of Excellence. “We think it’s important to classify crude oil by measurable characteristics” like vapor pressure and boiling point, “and not simply classify it by geographic source.”

Foxx told the audience that increased oil production in North Dakota — which now tops 1 million barrels per day — has led to a lot of DOT work on crude transportation. That work includes its crude testing program, Operation Classification, “which has showed us that the particular crude oil here finds itself on the higher end of volatility compared to other crude oils.”

“In addition to that, what we’re also finding is that because the oil is being transported over long distances, and in some cases in high numbers of trains back to back to back, that the risk level is higher than we have seen in some other parts of the country,” he said.

Last month, the DOT proposed enhanced tank car standards that would phase out the use of older DOT-111 tank cars for shipment of most crude oil within two years, Foxx said.

“And let me say specifically that we don’t single out Bakken oil from other oil,” he said.

Foxx said the DOT will continue researching crude characteristics.

Dalrymple said “we need to stop going around in this little circle about the word ‘Bakken,’” and noted the Industrial Commission will call a hearing, probably within the next month, to seek input on conditioning Bakken crude before storage and loading to try to lower its volatility.

Rep. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said a House oversight hearing is set for Sept. 9 in Washington, D.C., to review the industry report and “see just where Bakken crude falls in terms of characteristics.”

U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz also attended Friday’s meeting, the ninth of 11 meetings being held to help the Obama administration develop a national policy for energy infrastructure.

The administration is committed to an all-of-the-above energy strategy, and “North Dakota exemplifies that in so many ways,” Moniz said, noting he’d be driving by a wind-turbine farm on his way to tour the Great Plains Synfuels coal gasification plant near Beulah later in the day.

Moniz said it’s somewhat ironic that the nation is in an era of “energy plenty,” yet it’s developed so rapidly that infrastructure hasn’t had time to adjust, citing oil-by-rail challenges as one example.

U.S. Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., who sits on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said companies need regulatory certainty if they’re to invest in infrastructure such as pipelines and rail. He said U.S. oil production since 2009 is up 60 percent on private lands but down 7 percent on public lands.

“We’ve got to cut through these bottlenecks, the red tape,” he said, citing his proposed legislation to simplify regulations and give states primary responsibility to manage hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

But among those who submitted public comments Friday were Dakota Resource Council members who called for a slowdown of oil permitting to allow natural gas gathering infrastructure to catch up and reduce flaring. North Dakota burned off 28 percent of its natural gas produced in May, according to a DOE memo.

Linda Weiss of Belfield, who serves as DRC board chairwoman and can see a gas flare about a quarter-mile from her home, said members also want more consideration given to landowners and planning to determine the best routes for pipelines and other infrastructure.

“They usually pit landowners against each other. They don’t do their due diligence to find the best route,” she said.

The volunteer ambulance service member also said more training is needed for emergency responders.

“What if something like Casselton or Quebec (happens)?” she said, referring to the derailment and explosion of train cars carrying Bakken crude that killed 47 people on July 6, 2013, in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, and the train derailment Dec. 30 near Casselton, N.D., that produced spectacular fireballs, but no injuries. “There is no way any of these small towns are prepared.”