Discussion of Bay Area oil refinery-related projects postponed to May
By Tom Lochner, Contra Costa Times | 04/22/2014
SAN FRANCISCO — A discussion of five Bay Area energy projects and their permit status was moved to next month, after a regional committee hosting it spent most of a morning talking about another matter of public concern, the tracking of emissions from petroleum refining.
The Stationary Source Committee of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District tentatively rescheduled the energy projects discussion to May 1, said committee chairman John Gioia.
The five projects are:
Crude oil shipment by rail to the Valero refinery in Benicia;
A WesPac Energy crude oil terminal in Pittsburg;
A propane and butane recovery project at the Phillips 66 refinery in Rodeo;
A hydrogen and sulfur recovery project at the Chevron refinery in Richmond;
Kinder Morgan’s ethanol and crude oil rail-to-truck transloading operation in Richmond.
Monday’s committee meeting focused on developing rules for tracking petroleum refining emissions.
Features under consideration include deploying “fence line” emission air monitoring systems and other community air monitoring systems; developing enhanced tracking methodology; and providing more opportunities for public review and comment. More hearings could follow, and the full board could consider adopting rules in October.
Issues of contention between environmentalists and representatives of refining industries include an emissions baseline, emissions reduction credits and a cap on emissions. Several environmentalists cautioned the board not to let tracking and collecting data become a substitute for action to clean the air.
ODOT acts to limit disclosure of oil train shipments after The Oregonian won its release
By Rob Davis | April 22, 2014
Heavily redacted forms released by ODOT show where oil moves by rail in Oregon and the specific volume. The agency plans to no longer seek the reports.
The Oregon Department of Transportation, the state’s rail safety overseer, says it will no longer ask railroads for reports detailing where crude oil moves through the state after The Oregonian successfully sought to have them made public.
Railroads “provided us courtesy copies with the understanding we wouldn’t share it — believing it might be protected,” ODOT spokesman David Thompson said in an email. “We now know that the info is NOT protected; so do the railroads.”
The result? At a time of heightened public concern about increasing volumes of crude oil moving by rail in Oregon, ODOT is reducing the flow of information that has benefited not only the public but its own employees.
State law requires railroads to annually submit detailed reports saying what dangerous substances they’ve moved, where and in what volume. They’re due to emergency responders across the state by March 1 of each year. That hasn’t been happening.
The reports have been sent to ODOT instead, which historically acted as a central hub, providing the information on request to firefighters across the state.
ODOT officials say that process needs reform. But as ODOT begins working to change those disclosure rules, its officials say they no longer need any reports.
“The exact quantity of those specific shipments doesn’t impact our work,” said Shelley Snow, another ODOT spokeswoman. “Our focus is on any and all shipments traveling through the state.”
If ODOT safety inspectors need to know anything about hazardous material trends, Snow said, they can call railroads to ask.
The reports ODOT has received are the public’s only way to know how much oil moves by rail through specific corridors in Oregon. They provide the most comprehensive view of the volumes hauled through Portland, Salem, Bend, Eugene and Klamath Falls.
Trains in Oregon carry the same type of flammable North Dakota oil involved in three high-profile explosions last year, including one that killed 47 people and leveled part of a Canadian town. Rob Davis/The Oregonian
They’ve also been valuable for ODOT’s employees. Michael Eyer, a retired ODOT rail safety inspector, said he used the annual reports to do his job. The reports helped Eyer spot trends, see whether new hazards were moving and decide where to target his field inspections.
“It was our only institutional memory,” Eyer said. “There’s no other place to get the data, no other way to have this information.”
Railroads won’t tell the public how much hazardous material such as crude oil they move, saying it’s a security risk, even though the tank cars move openly in labeled containers.
The Oregonian in March obtained an order from the state Department of Justice that required ODOT to release the reports. Not disclosing them “could infringe on the public’s ability to assess the local and statewide risks” posed by crude oil rail shipments, a Justice Department attorney said.
The heavily redacted forms showed exactly where oil moved in the state through 2012. But ODOT said it did not have reports for 2013, a year in which oil-by-rail shipments increased 250 percent in Oregon.
The Oregonian requested 2013 records on April 14, more than a month after they were due. ODOT said it still didn’t have them and didn’t plan to seek them from railroads.
The decision typifies the unusual lengths to which ODOT goes to accommodate the railroads it regulates. Though it is supposed to be an independent safety watchdog, ODOT’s rail division treats the companies it oversees as cooperative stakeholders.
“I’m certainly concerned by what I hear and want to find out about that,” said state Rep. Barbara Smith Warner, a Portland Democrat who’s taken an interest in oil train safety.
Eyer and another retired ODOT rail official said the agency’s move is a bad idea that could threaten public safety.
“Because of your records request, they’re trying to bail out,” Eyer said. “I don’t think for safety it’s the wisest decision. It puts us in a situation where no one knows the overall picture. Things will fall through the cracks.”
If the reports aren’t collected, new rail inspectors hired by ODOT won’t have any background material to know what’s historically moved around the state, Eyer said. “Any new inspector coming in will be dependent on the kindness of strangers,” he said.
Claudia Howells, a former ODOT rail administrator, said forcing the state’s lone hazardous materials inspector to make phone calls to determine what dangerous substances were moving around the state would only add to the workload of someone already responsible for overseeing tens of thousands of shipments statewide.
“Part of the function of government regulatory systems is to act as a referee and provide assurance to the public that things are as they should be,” Howells said. “Right now, I have a higher level of confidence in the railroads than their regulator.”
State faces planning ‘gap’ if faced with a Quebec-type crude disaster
By Marina Villeneuve, Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting
April 17, 2014 8:46 AM
First of two parts. The rail line runs as far south as South Berwick in Maine.
Trains that have carried crude oil have passed through the middle of Jackman — just as they had through Lac-Megantic, Quebec. Jeff Pouland Photography/NFS
Less than a year ago, a runaway train carrying crude oil derailed in Lac-Mégantic, a small Quebec town ten miles from the Maine border.
Thousands of gallons of the highly flammable crude oil spilled from ruptured tank cars, setting off fireballs in the town’s center that killed 47 people and destroyed 30 buildings. Some bodies were likely vaporized and never identified.
In Maine, trains carrying the same crude oil have been passing through dozens of communities, many as close to homes, businesses and people as in Lac-Mégantic.
Railroads carried 4.2 million barrels of crude oil – enough to fill 267 Olympic-size swimming pools – through Maine last year, up from 25,319 barrels in 2011, according to state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) data. No crude oil shipments by rail have passed through Maine since last fall, according to state records, but industry experts say if shipping by rail becomes cheaper than other forms of transport, that could change.
Laura Smyth works at a propane company located behind a gas station in Jackman and not far from the railroad tracks. She said that when townspeople hear a train whistle, it remains them about what happened in Lac-Mégantic.
They don’t know if the train is carrying potatoes, lumber – or crude.
“We always say, ‘It could have happened here!’” said Smyth.
And if it did happen in Jackman or Portland or any of the towns along the rail, is Maine prepared to fight a crude oil fire, save lives and protect the environment?
A investigation by Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting reveals the burden for planning and responding to a Lac-Mégantic level catastrophe will fall on state and local emergency services, which may not have all the information, training or material they could need.
The potential for a crude oil incident in Maine like the one in Lac-Mégantic has prompted three state emergency groups to make the issue a key topic at the April 22-23 statewide Emergency Management Conference in Augusta.
“We’ve been fortunate, but being fortunate doesn’t mean we’re prepared,” said Robert Gardner, a technological hazards coordinator at Maine Emergency Management Agency.
He pointed to another nearby crude oil incident, in New Brunswick, Canada, when on Jan. 7, eight cars carrying crude oil and propane derailed and generated a massive fire and cloud of orange smoke. “We need to learn what others have experienced so we can be better prepared,” Gardner said.
Federal regulators and industry observers say recent fiery derailments across the continent have revealed a glaring lack of emergency preparedness requirements.
Unlike the marine barges, pipelines and fixed facilities that have transported and stored crude oil for years, U.S. railroads are not federally required to have comprehensive plans in case of a worst-case oil disaster.
“It’s a big gap,” said David Willaeur, of emergency management firm IEM and the former planning director for the Greater Portland Council of Governments.
“Now we have crude oil coming by in mile-long unit trains through remote areas along the U.S., and shipped to refineries on the coast … the oil-response plans need to have a land-based component to them.”
This gap has exacerbated the challenge of planning for oil disasters in rural states like Maine, where:
* State, county and local officials do not know the oil-spill response plans and capabilities of any railroad companies in Maine because the rail firms are not required to share or coordinate such information.
* The first people on scene at a rural oil incident will be declining numbers of volunteer firefighters who are hours from the highly-trained response teams and special kind of equipment, materials and gear needed to handle oil fires. Of 59 communities along rail lines, five have no fire department and 27 rely on solely volunteers.
* Like in all other states, no Maine officials are provided with any information about hazardous materials transported by rail through communities. Last month, Maine Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) asked Pan Am Railways for a list of the top 25 most hazardous goods shipped through Maine in 2013 and is awaiting a response, said agency director Bruce Fitzgerald.
The need to improve emergency response planning for crude oil rail disasters came up at an April 9 U.S. Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on railway safety, where both Sen. Susan Collins, a ranking member of the subcommittee, and Rangeley Fire Chief Tim Pellerin spoke on the need to better train and prepare rural firefighters.
“It’s also important to recognize that much of that rail network exists in rural America, and that presents unique challenges to small communities that often lack the resources to effectively respond to hazardous material emergencies,” Sen. Collins, a Republican, said at the hearing.
Feds don’t require railroad emergency plans
Do railways transporting crude oil through Maine have adequate response plans in case a catastrophe happens? Thanks to a federal loophole, no one – including the state of Maine – knows.
Two railroads have carried crude oil from the Bakken shale region of North Dakota into Maine: Pan Am Railways and Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway, the carrier that operated tank cars that derailed and ruptured at Lac-Mégantic.
Pan Am Railways Executive Vice President Cynthia Scarano did not respond to repeated interview requests over the course of two months. MMA Railways filed for bankruptcy last August, when it also stopped shipping crude oil. The New York-based firm Fortress Investment Group is in the process of purchasing its assets.
MMA Railways didn’t have sufficient resources to respond to Lac-Mégantic – and it would have been just as unprepared if it had happened in the U.S, according to the National Safety Transportation Board’s (NTSB) Jan. 23 letter to the Federal Rail Administration.
There are no federal rules for how railroads should prepare for any emergency involving hazardous materials, including crude oil, said Willaeur.
“It’s all voluntary, and there’s no standard for what they need to do,” said Willaeur, who has conducted studies of hazardous materials transport in states, including Maine. “So you have a pretty wide range of responses between railroads.”
The country’s seven Class 1 railroads, which have annual revenues of $250 million or more, have system-wide plans that include handling emergencies in local communities and sensitive geographic areas, according to Willaeur.
“On the other end, you have railroads that may have only a rudimentary plan in place,” he said, noting there are 550 smaller railroads known as short-line and regional railroads. Maine is one of four continental states with no Class 1 carrier.
When it comes to oil spills – as opposed to emergency planning — railroads must write basic response plans, but they don’t need to be shared with state agencies or sent to the Federal Rail Administration.
These basic plans don’t include training drills and exercises, assigning a qualified individual to man the response or plans for a worst-case discharge – which can result in up to three million gallons spilled.
“[O]il spill response planning requirements for rail transportation of oil/petroleum products are practically nonexistent compared with other modes of transportation,” NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman wrote to the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration on Jan. 21.
Railroads only have to file comprehensive plans if they haul a tank car with a 42,000-gallon capacity – and no tank cars currently in use can hold that much.
This means no shippers have to tell the government, or anybody, what they’d do in case of a disaster, even if they’re hauling ten, average size-tank cars carrying a total 300,000 gallons of crude oil. The rule was developed when crude oil wasn’t being shipped in trains that carry only crude and can haul millions of gallons at once.
This current regulatory scheme “circumvents the need for railroads to comply with spill response planning mandates of the Clean Water Act,” Hersman wrote to the hazardous materials agency.
Comprehensive plans must only be submitted to the Federal Rail Administration, which is not required to review and approve them, Hersman wrote.
“It’s a pitiful pretense of regulation,” said rail security consultant Fred Millar, who worked for the liberal activist group Friends of the Earth for 18 years. “Railroads have gotten themselves exempted from the same kind of response planning and right-to-know laws that apply to everyone else.”
If requirements had been updated as crude shipments began skyrocketing, the federal rail regulators could have required MMA Railway to plan for a disaster on the scale of Lac-Mégantic, wrote Hersman to the regulators.
“DEP and to some extent local communities have taken on that responsibility to be prepared in the event of a spill,” said Maine Department of Environmental Protection’s response director Peter Blanchard.
Responding to rail incidents is challenging in Maine, where railroads traverse cities, rural communities and water bodies – many inaccessible by road, according to Blanchard.
DEP asked Pan Am Railways for copies of their response plans, but never heard back, according to Blanchard.
Blanchard said railroads have made “some effort” to help DEP in preparing for an oil spill, citing a collaboration with MMA Railway that yielded a vulnerability map of sensitive natural resources and remote access points along rail lines.
The DEP has 25 spill responders, with five always on-call at offices in Portland, Augusta, Bangor and Presque Isle. Their equipment includes oil skimmers and two 5,000-barrel oil recovery barges stationed in South Portland and Bucksport.
Volunteers may be first to crash
Recent train derailments involving crude oil and ethanol have raised a question for emergency planners: Who responds when incidents happen in the middle of nowhere?
“When they happen in remote areas, away from populated areas, you not only have fewer resources but volunteer fire departments that don’t necessarily have the capability to handle an incident of that size,” said Willaeur of emergency management firm IEM.
About 90 percent of Maine’s firefighters are volunteer, estimates the Maine Fire Services Institute’s Bill Guimond.
“Probably the biggest challenge facing a lot of departments is just resources on the initial response, especially in the rural communities,” Guimond said. “Firefighters are not always available, and a lot of communities are strapped with resources right now.”
Along rail lines that have carried crude oil, five cities have professional departments. Five small communities have no fire departments, 27 rely on an all-volunteer force and 22 rely on both volunteer and career firefighters.
“It’s certainly a different kind of response when you don’t have everybody right on-call all the time,” said MEMA’s Fitzgerald. “They have to get out of their job, they have to travel to get their equipment, they have to go and respond. Those communities rely almost entirely on mutual aid, because no one department up there is big enough to handle an event.”
If a rail catastrophe happens, local responders like firefighters would receive support from other towns through mutual aid agreements, 17 state-supervised hazardous material teams, spill responders, MEMA and, potentially, federal agencies and out-of-state and Canadian responders.
Since last July, hazardous material teams in Paris and Jonesboro have shut down because they lacked enough people to maintain staffing and training requirements. Rail communities like Jackman, Greenville and Vanceboro are up to two hours away from specially-trained teams in Orono, Skowhegan and Houlton.
Maine’s hazardous material teams train regularly for major oil fires, train rollovers and derailments, according to Mark Hyland, MEMA’s operations and response director. In the past decade, Maine railways have provided locomotives and tank cars to train firefighters and spill responders, according to Blanchard.
Some fire officials said though they appreciate the seminars, training efforts with railroads are not institutionalized, proving a problem for departments with high rates of turnover.
Waterville Fire Chief David LaFountain asked Pan Am Railways last year for specialized training in dealing with volatile Bakken crude oil, but he never heard back from the railroad.
In Maine, state and cities like South Portland have invested in the costly resources – like protective gear and specialized foam – needed for a fiery disaster even a fraction of Lac-Mégantic’s size.
In 2009, Maine Emergency Management Agency received a Homeland Security grant to buy three $80,000, 990-gallon foam trailers and placed them in South Portland, Searsport and Sweden. The Air National Guard at Bangor International Airport has 2,000 gallons of foam concentrate.
South Portland has 20,000 gallons of alcohol-resistant foam to smother petroleum fires. Fire chief Kevin Guimond said his team is ready to respond statewide, with 64 full-time firefighters and paramedics and 40 on-call firefighters.
But that big cache of foam is four hours away from communities along rail lines like Jackman and Vanceboro. Half of communities on the rail lines are two to four hours away, with 15 facing wait times of more than three hours.
Information hard to get Maine officials don’t know much about hazardous materials transported by rail, including what kinds go where, or when, how often, and how much they’re shipped. Railroads say sharing such information could jeopardize security.
“There’s a lack of rail transportation response plans because it’s hard to get the information,” said Willaeur. “Many local officials don’t have an idea of what’s going along rails or highway corridor.”
Though U.S. railroads don’t have to disclose any information about hazardous materials to communities, they are not prevented from doing so.
Voluntary industry standards encourage railroads to do so – upon request, and as long as first responders do not make such information public.
MEMA’s Fitzgerald wrote to Pan Am on Feb. 7 requesting a list of the top 25 most hazardous materials transported through Maine in 2013. He is still awaiting a response.
Currently, first responders can figure out what a derailed train car is hauling by reading the placard affixed to the side of a rail car, finding the crew member who has a paper document showing where hazardous materials are located on the train, or calling the railroads’ 1-800 number.
According to an 1817 Congressional act and the interstate commerce clause, railroads can’t refuse to ship anything, including hazardous goods, and only the federal government can restrict such movement, said MEMA’s Hyland.
“But you know, having said that, we’d like to know what’s coming through, just so we can prepare our communities and our regional response teams for what they’d see,” he said.
LaFountain said in his opinion, the rail yard in Waterville – a town where trains carrying crude pass through – is his city’s “most dangerous spot,” and he worries how his team could respond if there was a crude oil emergency.
“To be honest with you, when I saw what happened in Lac-Mégantic, the behavior of the product catching fire and having the ignition it had and the fire conditions it had, that wasn’t what I expected for typical crude oil,” said LaFountain. “Now hearing that this crude oil is different because of where it comes from, it raises concern. It’s not safe.”
—–
CRUDE-BY-RAIL IN MAINE
Railroads carried 4.2 million barrels of crude oil – enough to fill up 267 Olympic-size swimming pools – through Maine last year, up from 25,000 barrels in 2011 and down from 5.2 million barrels in 2012.
The 2013 amount does not include the months of April to August when Pan Am Railways temporarily stopped reporting how much crude oil it shipped into Maine and paying into the state’s three-cent per gallon oil spill clean-up fund, according to Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman Jessamine Logan.
At the time, the company told the Bangor Daily News that state law did not specifically require them to do so. The state legislature revised the statute effective last October.
After several fiery train explosions involving crude from the Bakken shale region of North Dakota, federal regulators issued a Jan. 2 warning that the crude may be more flammable than other varieties. A federal “Bakken Blitz” investigation has revealed that in eleven out of 18 random samples, Bakken crude was misclassified as a less volatile variety.
Three railroads – Pan Am Railways, Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway, and Eastern Maine Railroad – have carried Bakken crude oil through Maine to an Irving Oil refinery in St. John, New Brunswick.
The MMA Railway line enters Maine at Jackman and then traverses across central Maine to Mattawamkeag. The now-bankrupt company, whose assets are in the final steps of being purchased by a New York-based investment firm, stopped carrying crude oil last August.
A Pan Am line enters Maine at South Berwick and carries crude through towns near Interstate 95, including Portland and Bangor, before heading to Mattawamkeag.
There, the Irving Oil subsidiary Eastern Maine Railroad transports the crude oil from Mattawamkeag, to Vanceboro, to the refinery. Eastern Maine Railroad does not pay into the clean-up fund because state law only impacts carriers bringing oil into Maine, according to Logan.
In Maine, crude oil shipments by rail have dropped off since last fall, but industry experts say dynamic global oil prices could quickly change that.
North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources director Lynn Helms has estimated that up to 90 percent of the state’s crude will be transported by rail in 2014.
Following growing scrutiny on the rupture-prone DOT-111 tank cars involved in recent derailments, Irving Oil announced in February that by April 30, it will voluntarily retrofit its crude oil fleet to meet higher standards recommended by the Association of American Railroads for tank cars built after 2011.
Even stricter federal standards for the tank cars could be released by the end of 2014, said Cynthia Quarterman, head of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration at a Feb. 26 Congressional hearing.
Last year, U.S. railroads spilled more crude oil – 1.15 million gallons – than in the last 38 years combined, according to a McClatchy news service analysis of federal data that does not include the 1.6 million gallons spilled in Lac Megantic.
The Association of American Railroad states that through 2010, 99.9977% of rail shipments of hazardous material reached their destination without a release caused by a train accident.
In Maine, railroads have spilled more than 200 gallons of hazardous materials like flammable gas oil and sulfuric acid since 2003, according to a review of Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration data. This represents a large decrease from the 120,000 gallons of hazardous materials like fuel oil and sulfuric acid reported spilled between 1976 to 1999.
Approximately one gallon of crude oil spilled in March of 2013, when 13 tank cars operated by Pan Am Railways derailed near the Pencobst River in Mattawamkeag, according to a report filed to the National Response Center. Each car in the 96-car unit train was carrying 31,000 gallons of crude.
— Marina Villeneuve
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The Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting is a nonpartisan, non-profit news service based in Hallowell. Email: mainecenter@gmail.com. Web: pinetreewatchdog.org.
Repost from KTXL FOX40 Sacramento/Stockton
[Editor: This is an excellent video report, but I can’t post it to run here because it runs commercial ads ad nauseum. My apologies but you really should click on the image which takes you to the KTXL page where you can view this video. It has footage from Valero’s community meeting, brief comments by West Sacramento Mayor Chris Cobaldon and Fire Chief Rick Martinez of West Sacramento, and an update from the April 17 Sacramento Area Council of Governments. The text below summarizes the video, if you can’t stomach the commercials. – RS]
Communities Concerned Over Crude Oil Train Plan
Note – this will take you to KTXL’s website for the video. Please be patient – commercial ad content.
SACRAMENTO 17 Apr 2014 – Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor train is the chauffeur-driven commute for thousands in the Sacramento region.
But those runs to the Bay and back may soon be sharing the rails with something that could turn those trips of ease into trips of angst.
“That could be scary. It might deter me from taking the train,” rider Mary Pierschbacher said.
Those fears are about Valero’s plan to send up to 100 train cars full of a highly flammable crude oil through downtown Sacramento every day.
The cars would be traveling on Union Pacific lines through Roseville, West Sacramento, Davis and on into Benicia to a proposed rail terminal at Valero’s refinery there.
Tempers flared at public meetings in Benicia as the company and homeowners debated the potential threat that could be rolling through neighborhoods.
“Our crew, the railroad and the community is clearly capable of responding to an incident that happens,” Valero’s Chris Howe said.
Late notice of the impact in the Valley sent reps from targeted cities into a Thursday meeting at the Sacramento Area Council of Governments.
Mayors and emergency responders plan to draft a letter of concern to Valero.
“We can’t plan for every eventuality, but we need to know what the range of possibilities are so we can make the appropriate preparations. And if we can’t then we need to raise our voices and object to the project,” said West Sacramento Mayor Chris Cabaldon.
“I think we still have a lot of work ahead of us to come to to a real solution, but i think we’ve taken some good first steps today,” said Rick Martinez, Fire Chief of West Sacramento.
The plan for more crude to ride the rails is a way to keep pace with increased fracking in places like northeastern North Dakota in the Bakken oil fields.
The trouble is that explosion in production is bringing to the surface oil that is lighter and more flammable than other types.
Bakken crude was in the 72 runaway train cars that derailed and exploded in Lac Megantic, Quebec last July – killing 47 people and decimating the town’s center.
If a crash like that happened along the Capitol Corridor route through Sacramento, the new Kings arena could be just one of many city investments destroyed.
And as of right now, crews forced to respond would have little information about how many rail cars were filled with what.
“For our first responders who are supposed to be taking care of the emergency…it doesn’t help with even less information for them to go on,” said Adams.
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