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No One Wants These Rail Oil Tankers


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August 15, 2014

 

Oil booms in North Dakota’s Bakken shale formation and Alberta’s oil sands have left producers scrambling for ways to get their crude to market. Both regions have seen production develop faster than the infrastructure necessary to transport oil to refineries, and as such, drillers have been forced to get creative. Lacking pipelines, the most robust and cost-effective option for these kinds of massive onshore operations, producers have been sending their crude by rail, but in doing so have run the very real risk of explosive derailment.

 

As more and more crude rides the rails, the risk of disasters like the kind seen in Quebec’s Lac Megantic last summer increases, which explains why the Department of Transportation has been preparing rules to phase out older train cars seen as particularly vulnerable to rupture. So as not to unduly upset the railroad industry, the DOT has pointed out that Canadian producers will be able to use the retiring cars to ship tar sands oil, which is a less explosive variety than Bakken shale crude. But Reuters reports, it looks like Canada won’t want to use these older tankers to transport oil, either:

 

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One can understand why oil-by-rail arose in the first place, given how quickly the shale boom and development of Canadian oil sands have come. But what were meant initially to be stop-gap measures are now being perceived as more permanent solutions because we’re not building pipelines to connect these new oil reserves with refineries. And so, while the U.S. and Canada dicker over what to do with prone-to-puncture rail cars, the eminently more sensible option—the Keystone XL pipeline—languishes in political purgatory.

 

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Flash Point: New Oil-by-Rail Rules
Proposed regulations of oil-bearing trains pose several challenges and divert us from more important safety questions.
Kenneth P. Green
Wednesday, August 20, 2014

On July 6, 2013, a train carrying crude oil from the Bakken formation in North Dakota exploded in the middle of Lac-Mégantic, a small town in the Canadian province of Quebec. The incident was genuinely catastrophic, killing 47 people, and destroying half the town center. The derailment and explosion was the fourth-deadliest rail accident in Canadian history. Naturally, the Lac-Mégantic disaster set off a firestorm of protest, aimed at railroads, government, and the oil boom that is revolutionizing oil markets in the United States – the tremendous gusher coming from the Bakken formation, a gas-and-oil bearing shale formation that stretches from North Dakota, through Montana, and north into Saskatchewan and Alberta.

 

Yesterday, Canada’s Transportation Safety Board released a report on its investigation of the Lac-Mégantic disaster. The investigation suggests that the cause of the disaster was a combination of human error and insufficient safety protocols. “Accidents never come down to a single individual, a single action or a single factor. You have to look at the whole context,” said Wendy Tadros, chair of the TSB, in a news release. She continued:

 

 

 

In our investigation, we found 18 factors played a role in this accident. The TSB found MMA [the rail company involved] was a company with a weak safety culture that did not have a functioning safety management system to manage risks. The TSB also learned that Transport Canada did not audit MMA often and thoroughly enough to ensure it was effectively managing the risks in its operations. Furthermore, the Board found problems with training, employee monitoring, and maintenance practices at MMA; with industry rules for the securement of unattended trains; and with the tank cars used to carry volatile petroleum crude oil.

 

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