By Kathy Kerridge, Vallejo Times-Herald, 07/08/2014
The Benicia Planning commission will take public comments tonight at City Hall on the Draft Environmental Impact Report for Valero’s Crude by Rail project. Written comments are due by Aug. 1. This project would bring 100 rail cars a day over the Donner Pass or through the Feather River Canyon, over rivers, through Truckee, Roseville, Sacramento, Davis, Dixon, Fairfield, the Suisun Marsh and into Benicia.
These trains could be carrying the same Bakken Crude that exploded in Canada, killing 47 people and Canadian Tar Sands, which have proved impossible to clean up when it has spilled in waterways. Some have claimed this is safe. Everyone should be aware that the National Transportation Safety Board in January said that trains carrying crude oil should “where technically feasible require rerouting to avoid transportation of such hazardous materials through populated and other sensitive areas.” At this point in time it is feasible to keep these dangerous materials from going through populated areas by not approving the project. Otherwise it will not be feasible.
The new railcars that Valero says it will use are the same ones that ruptured and spilled April 30, 2014 in Lynchburg, Virginia, threatening Richmond’s water supply. The Department of Transportation is in the process of crafting new rules for rail cars carrying crude, but there is no time line for when they will be issued and it will be some time before any new cars are available. There have been two train derailments in Benicia’s Industrial Park in recent months.
Why the rush? Is Valero running out of crude oil? No. The reason Valero wants to bring in this dangerous crude, in rail cars that split and rupture in a derailment, is that this crude oil is on sale right now. The oil isn’t going anywhere. It isn’t safe to transport through populated areas and all of the communities that this crude goes through will be at risk.
Repost from NATUREInternational Weekly Journal of Science [Editor: a friend sent this excellent overview of policy struggles behind the tar sands debacle in Alberta and the Keystone XL pipeline in the U.S. Significant quote: “As scientists spanning diverse disciplines, we urge North American leaders to take a step back: no new oil-sands projects should move forward unless developments are consistent with national and international commitments to reducing carbon pollution. Anything less demonstrates flawed policies and failed leadership. With such high stakes, our nations and the world cannot afford a series of ad hoc, fragmented decisions.” – RS]
Energy: Consider the global impacts of oil pipelines
25 June 2014, by Wendy J. Palen, Thomas D. Sisk, Maureen E. Ryan, Joseph L. Árvai, Mark Jaccard, Anne K. Salomon, Thomas Homer-Dixon, & Ken P. Lertzman
Debates over oil-sands infrastructure obscure a broken policy process that overlooks broad climate, energy and environment issues, warn Wendy J. Palen and colleagues.
The debate over the development of oil sands in Alberta, Canada, is inflaming tensions in and between Canada and the United States.
In April, US President Barack Obama deferred a decision on the fate of the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, despite escalating pressure to approve it from Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The contentious pipeline would transport 830,000 barrels per day of partially refined bitumen from Alberta’s oil sands, through the US Midwest, to Gulf Coast refineries. Harper is also facing a controversial domestic battle over his approval on 17 June of the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, to connect Alberta with a port on British Columbia’s remote Pacific coast.
But drama over the pipelines obscures a larger problem — a broken policy process. Both Canada and the United States treat oil-sands production, transportation, climate and environmental policies as separate issues, assessing each new proposal in isolation. A more coherent approach, one that evaluates all oil-sands projects in the context of broader, integrated energy and climate strategies, is sorely needed.
Although Keystone XL and Northern Gateway are among the first major North American projects to highlight flaws in oil-sands policies, more than a dozen other projects are on the drawing board. Meanwhile, the US government is considering its first oil-sands leases on federal lands, as bitumen mining expands on state land in Utah’s Uinta Basin.
As scientists spanning diverse disciplines, we urge North American leaders to take a step back: no new oil-sands projects should move forward unless developments are consistent with national and international commitments to reducing carbon pollution. Anything less demonstrates flawed policies and failed leadership. With such high stakes, our nations and the world cannot afford a series of ad hoc, fragmented decisions.
Incremental decisions
Current public debate about oil-sands development focuses on individual pipeline decisions. Each is presented as an ultimatum — a binary choice between project approval and lost economic opportunity. This approach artificially restricts discussions to only a fraction of the consequences of oil development, such as short-term economic gains and job creation, and local impacts on human health and the environment. Lost is a broader conversation about national and international energy and economic strategies, and their trade-offs with environmental justice and conservation.
This pattern of incremental decisions creates the misguided idea that oil-sands expansion is inevitable. By restricting the range of choices, governments have allowed corporations to profit from one-off policy decisions, leading to a doubling of oil-sands production in Alberta in the past decade, with production forecast to double again to 3.9 million barrels per day in the coming decade1. The collective result of these decisions is unnecessarily high social, economic and environmental costs.
When judged in isolation, the costs, benefits and consequences of a particular oil-sands proposal may be deemed acceptable. But impacts mount with multiple projects. The cumulative effects of new mines, refineries, ports, pipelines, railways and a fleet of transoceanic supertankers are often at odds with provincial, state, federal or international laws protecting clean water, indigenous rights, biodiversity and commitments to control carbon emissions.
Oil-sands development in Alberta, for example, has irreversibly transformed more than 280 square kilometres of the boreal landscape by burning or degrading peatlands covering oil-sands deposits2. Such ecosystems represent long-term carbon sinks that require thousands of years to develop. The development has also elevated waterway concentrations of chemical contaminants such as polycyclic aromatic compounds that are toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms3, 4, and has been associated with a tenuous but troubling rise in rare cancers in downstream indigenous communities5.
Major infrastructure such as pipelines requires decades of operation to recoup the initial investment, fostering expansion of oil-sands projects upstream and refineries and ports downstream. For example, the proposed US$5.4-billion Keystone XL pipeline would drive further oil-sands extraction by providing access to Gulf Coast refineries and profitable export markets (see ‘Big decisions’). Such investments create a ‘lock-in’ that commits society to decades of environmental degradation, increased risk of contamination and spills, and unsustainable carbon pollution.
Oil-sands production has already caused dramatic increases in carbon pollution. The United States and Canada have committed to the same 2020 greenhouse-gas emissions target: a 17% decrease relative to 2005 levels. But Canada’s agencies predict that it will miss its target by 122 million tonnes annually6, 7. Although emissions in many sectors are falling, those from oil-sands production are predicted to triple from 2005 by 2020, from 34 million to 101 million tonnes.
Smart steps
Despite these predictions, public discussions around emissions from expanding oil-sands production are being muted. Since 2010, public hearings on proposed pipelines, including Northern Gateway, the Trans Mountain pipeline in British Columbia, and the Line 9B pipeline reversal in southern Ontario, have formally excluded testimony by experts or the public about carbon emissions and climate (see go.nature.com/mpx2sc).
We propose two steps to improve decisions about the development of oil sands. First, North American citizens and policy-makers must enact policies at national, state and provincial levels that acknowledge the global consequences of expanding oil-sands development. Legislated constraints on carbon pollution (such as a carbon tax or cap-and-trade) based on current climate science will help to ensure that the full social costs of carbon combustion are incorporated into investment decisions about energy and infrastructure. This will help companies and policy-makers to better judge trade-offs between investment in oil-sands projects, renewables and energy-conservation programmes, while catalysing innovation in low-carbon technologies.
Second, policy-makers need to adopt more transparent and comprehensive decision-making processes that incorporate trade-offs among conflicting objectives such as energy and economic development, environmental protection, human health and social justice. The decision sciences offer pathways, from problem identification to policy implementation, which can encompass a wide range of public values and address multiple drivers, linked effects and nested scales of cause and effect.
Decision-support tools are being developed for exploring how outcomes, priorities and trade-offs shift under different future energy scenarios. Possibilities might include the approval or rejection of pipeline proposals, more stringent low-carbon fuel standards, carbon taxes, or a spike or drop in global demand for Canadian oil8. Such tools can be used to identify thresholds where development should shift from one energy option to another, and evaluate which investments are most robust given environmental, social and economic policies and their effects on energy supply and demand8. The territorial government in the Canadian north is using these tools to identify energy options that protect the Arctic environment and developing economy, while meeting the needs of local communities9.
In the absence of a global accord to reduce carbon emissions, the United States and Canada should agree to a suite of shared policies to guide development of both carbon-based and low-emission sources of energy over the coming decades. Such coordination might seem unlikely given the ideological gulf between the current US and Canadian administrations, but that divide will not persist indefinitely.
A binational carbon and energy strategy should align with existing continental trade accords, provide a clear road map for decisions about energy development — particularly for unconventional oil — and enhance North American competitiveness and leadership. It should specify priorities, expectations and principles whereby decisions on infrastructure projects, such as Keystone XL or Northern Gateway, are made in the context of an overarching commitment to limit carbon emissions. North America’s energy challenges would then become a vehicle for beneficial economic coordination and integration rather than remaining a source of rancour and friction.
A key step is a moratorium on new oil-sands development and transportation projects until better policies and processes are in place. Reform is needed now: decisions made in North America will reverberate internationally, as plans for the development of similar unconventional reserves are considered worldwide.
With clearer policy, smarter decisions and stronger leadership, Canada and the United States can avoid the tyranny of incremental decisions — and the lasting economic and environmental damage that poorly conceived choices will cause.
By Matthew Brown, Associated Press, Jun 26, 2014
AP Photo/Matt Brown
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — The dangers posed by a spike in oil shipments by rail extend beyond crude from the booming Bakken region of the Northern Plains and include oil produced elsewhere in the U.S. and Canada, U.S. safety officials and lawmakers said.
Acting National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Christopher Hart said all crude shipments are flammable and can damage the environment – not just the Bakken shipments involved in a series of fiery accidents.
Hart cited recent derailments in Mississippi, Minnesota, New Brunswick and Pennsylvania of oil shipments from Canada. He said those cases exemplify “the risks to communities and for the environment for accidents involving non-Bakken crude oil.”
Hart’s comments were contained in a letter to U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley obtained by The Associated Press. They add to growing pressure on federal regulators to improve oil train safety in the wake of repeated derailments, including in Lac-Magentic, Quebec, where 47 people were killed in a massive conflagration last July.
Citing the highly volatile nature of Bakken oil, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx last month ordered railroads to notify states of shipments from the region so firefighters and first responders can better prepare for accidents.
But Wyden and Merkley told Foxx on Thursday that the order leaves emergency personnel in the dark on oil shipped from outside the Bakken region.
The Oregon Democrats urged Foxx to expand his order to cover crude from all parts of the U.S. and Canada. They also pressed for the 1 million-gallon minimum threshold in Foxx’s order to be lowered to include smaller shipments.
“With the exception of the Lac-Megantic accident, every accident involving crude oil, ethanol and other flammable materials since 2006 has resulted in a hazardous materials release of less than 1,000,000 gallons,” Wyden and Merkley wrote to Foxx in a letter.
They said the derailments cited by the transportation safety board show that trains carrying non-Bakken crude or less than 1 million gallons pose the same “imminent hazard” that Foxx has asserted for Bakken oil.
Bakken oil on average travels more than 1,600 miles to reach its destination, transportation officials said. That’s much further than oil from some other parts of the country.
U.S. transportation officials said the lengthier journey increases the overall risk exposure for Bakken oil – and is one reason it’s being treated differently than other hazardous cargos.
Representatives of the oil industry and officials in North Dakota also have complained about Bakken oil being singled out by regulators – although for opposite reasons. The American Petroleum Institute and American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers have argued Bakken oil is no more volatile than other light, sweet crudes.
The concerns aired Thursday by the NTSB and Oregon senators essentially flip that argument on its head, to say different types of crude and other hazardous liquids such as ethanol also pose a significant safety risk.
“Accidents involving crude oil or flammable liquids of any kind, especially when these liquids are transported in large volumes, such as in unit trains or blocks of tank cars, can have disastrous consequences,” Hart said.
Association of American Railroads spokeswoman Holly Arthur said the rail industry is complying with Foxx’s original order. She said the group would have to see the specifics of any proposed changes before commenting further.
About 700,000 barrels of oil a day – enough to fill 10 “unit trains” of 100 tank cars each – is coming out of the Bakken by rail, according to the North Dakota Pipeline Authority. That’s about 70 percent of crude-by-rail shipments nationwide, according to federal officials.
Yet the same hydraulic fracturing – or “fracking” – technology that has helped drive the boom in the Bakken region during the past decade is being employed on shale oil fields elsewhere. Crude from the tar sands of western Canada is also fueling the surge in North American production.
Charles Drevna, president of American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, said he supports getting more information on oil trains to first responders so they’re ready for potential accidents.
According to an analysis done for the U.S. State Department, more than half the loading capacity of oil train facilities built in recent years is in parts of the U.S. and Canada outside the Bakken region. That includes loading terminals in Colorado, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah and parts of western Canada.
Tar Sands on the Tracks: Railbit, Dilbit and U.S. Export Terminals
2014-06-17 | Ben Jervey
Last December, the first full train carrying tar sands crude left the Canexus Bruderheim terminal outside of Edmonton, Alberta, bound for an unloading terminal somewhere in the United States.
Canadian heavy crude, as the tar sands is labeled for market purposes, had ridden the rails in very limited capacity in years previous — loaded into tank cars and bundled with other products as part of so-called “manifest” shipments. But to the best of industry analysts’ knowledge, never before had a full 100-plus car train (called a “unit train”) been shipped entirely full of tar sands crude.
Because unit trains travel more quickly, carry higher volumes of crude and cost the shipper less per barrel to operate than the manifest alternative, this first shipment from the Canexus Bruderheim terminal signaled the start of yet another crude-by-rail era — an echo of the sudden rise of oil train transport ushered in by the Bakken boom, on a much smaller scale (for now).
This overall spike in North American crude-by-rail over the past few years has been well documented, and last month Oil Change International released a comprehensive report about the trend. As explained in Runaway Train: The Reckless Expansion of Crude-by-Rail in North America (and in past coverage in DeSmogBlog), much of the oil train growth has been driven by the Bakken shale oil boom. Without sufficient pipeline capacity in the area, drillers have been loading up much more versatile trains to cart the light, sweet tight crude to refineries in the Gulf, and on both coasts.
Unfortunately, some of these “bomb trains” never make it to their destination, derailing, spilling, exploding and taking lives.
While shale oil, predominantly from the Bakken, has driven the trend, Canadian tar sands producers are increasingly turning their attention to rail. Hobbled by limited pipeline capacity out of Alberta, and frustrated by their inability (so far) to ram the Keystone XL pipeline through the American heartland, tar sands producers are signing contracts with Canadian rail operators. Canadian National Railway is getting the lionshare of the business.
Canadian National not only has the infrastructure in place near Alberta’s tar sands developments, but also operates 19 subsidiary railways in the United States under the Grand Trunk Corporation. Strung together, Canadian National network stretches 2,800 miles from Western Canada down to the Gulf Coast, the only company that can offer straight-through shipping from the tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries.
Of the upstream infrastructure — or the loading terminals up near the tar sands, the Oil Change International report explains:
At the time of writing there were 31 terminals in operation that load tar sands or heavy crude, with six of these expanding and an additional eight planned or under construction…
The first terminal designed to load unit trains with Canadian tar sands crude, the Canexus terminal in Bruderheim, northeast of Edmonton, Alberta, started operations in December 2013. It has a capacity of 70,000 bpd and loads tar sands bitumen from MEG’s Christina Lake SAGD project, among others.
Downstream, rail terminals are similarly adapting to handle shipments of tar sands crude. From the Runaway Train report:
Terminals designed to unload tar sands crude are currently concentrated in the Gulf Coast region, where the biggest concentration of heavy oil refining capacity is located…
The Gulf Coast terminals have about one million bpd of unloading capacity today, set to grow to over two million bpd in 2016. Some of this capacity is at refineries such as those operated by Valero in Port Arthur, Texas, and St. Charles, Louisiana. Valero has ordered 1,600 insulated and coiled tank cars specifically for hauling tar sands crude to its refineries.
The Gulf Coast also has significant midstream capacity on the Mississippi River, where crude oil, including tar sands crude, is unloaded from trains and pumped from storage tanks into local pipelines or loaded onto barges that deliver to coastal refineries via the Intracoastal Waterway.
Meanwhile, refineries on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts are angling to get in on the action, hoping that their shipping advantages to Europe and Asia respectively will prove appealing to tar sands producers.
As described in Runaway Train, terminals on the West Coast are particularly well positioned to serve as a “fast-track out of North America for Canada’s tar sands.”
There are currently 13 crude-by-rail unloading terminals in California, Oregon and Washington, of which four are currently expanding their capacity. There are also 11 terminals planned or under construction.
Many of these are at refineries that, like their counterparts on the East Coast, are looking to take advantage of discounted domestic or Canadian crudes that they have little hope of ever gaining access to via pipeline. With a larger proportion of refining capacity geared up for heavy tar sands processing than exists on the East Coast, West Coast refineries such as the Valero facility in Wilmington, Calif., and the Phillips 66 refineries in California and Washington, are keen to rail in tar sands crude.
Accessing these West Coast refineries by rail, as well as the prospect of export terminals in Washington and Oregon, are potentially the tar sands industry’s best bet for major market expansion in the face of delays and possible cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline and pipelines to the Canadian west coast such as the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain expansion.
These latter projects, which are primarily focused on exporting tar sands crude to Asia, face particularly stiff opposition from coastal communities, which fear the destruction of fisheries and coastal environments from the increased tanker traffic that would ensue.
Given the relative proximity particularly of Washington State refineries and ports to Alberta’s tar sands fields, these terminals offer oil companies a potential solution to the transportation bottlenecks that are threatening the viability of tar sands production growth. At least three proposals in southern Washington State have the potential to unload tar sands crude from trains and load it onto tankers for export to Asia or transport to refineries along the California coast.
Tar sands producers are particularly motivated to get their crude to coastal terminals and refineries for export. As we’ve covered in the past on DeSmogBlog, tar sands companies want to export their product, because the low-grade crude is more easily refined into diesel, which has a much larger market in Europe and Asia. This is the core reason that the Keystone XL, if built, would be little more than an export pipeline, and wouldn’t actually provide more oil to American markets, nor lower American gas and heating oil prices.
The Oil Change International report also shines a light on the fact that though crude exports are banned from the U.S., domestic refineries can legally export crude from Canada.
While crude oil of U.S. origin is subject to export restrictions, no such restriction applies to exports of Canadian oil through the U.S., as long as it can be shown that no U.S. oil was blended.
Shippers wishing to export Canadian oil from U.S. ports still have to apply for export licenses from the Department of Commerce, but these can and have been granted. Given the lack of pipeline capacity to Canadian ports, it is attractive for tar sands producers to find ways to get their product to a U.S. port where it can be exported. Crude-by-rail terminals on the West and East Coasts are strategically important as they are closer to Alberta than those on the Gulf Coast and it is therefore cheaper to reach these ports by rail.
Railbit vs. Dilbit
As this still-nascent segment of crude-by-rail develops, it’s worthwhile to take a moment to understand the distinction between a couple of different tar sands products that are being shipped by train. The vast majority of tar sand crude-by-rail shipments thus far have been diluted bitumen, or dilbit. Dilbit, which you have heard of as the tar sands crude that is already funneling through North American pipelines, is composed of the sticky, viscous tar sands bitumen, which is then mixed with about 30 percent diluent, allowing it to flow through pipelines. This mixture of dilbit is particularly volatile and abrasive, and reports have pointed to it being more likely to cause leaks and spills and explosions during transport.
Railbit is a relatively new designation for crude, and is defined as bitumen that has been mix with roughly 17 percent diluent. Moving railbit, rather than dilbit, saves tar sands shippers about half of the so-called “diluent penalty,” or the cost of adding the diluent to the mix.
So why are most trains still loaded with dilbit? Because to this point, most loading terminals are still being fed by feeder pipelines or trucks that can only handle this more watered down blend. That and the fact that special loading and unloading facilities are necessary to handle railbit, which is more viscous and needs to be heated in special tank cars to be unloaded. Some downstream terminals are making these investments, seeing railbit as a viable alternative going forward, but today dilbit is still dominant.
Either way, it’s dirty and dangerous, and tar sands bitumen in any form does nothing to lower American energy bills. Bitumen, by rail or pipeline or barge, is bound to wind up on a tanker to Europe or Asia.
