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Collection: The Northwest's Pipeline on Rails

Sightline Seeks to Daylight Secret Exemptions to Crude Oil Export Ban

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What I see, by Asher Isbrucker, cc
What I See by Asher Isbrucker used under CC BY 2.0

For nearly four decades, the US federal government has maintained a “ban” on exporting domestic crude oil supplies. It’s been a cornerstone of the national energy landscape since President Ford signed the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act into law in pursuit of that perpetual goal of American politicians, energy independence.

Although the legal framework includes a number of exceptions—allowing exports of North Slope Alaskan and heavy California crude, as well as exports to Canada, among other loopholes—big oil companies have had the ban in their crosshairs for years. Now, in the midst of a production boom (despite moderate domestic demand), the industry has launched a lobbying assault on federal officials in the hopes of further boosting the payoff for large-scale fracking and drilling. And their efforts appear to be paying off.

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Why New Improved Oil Trains Are Not Nearly Good Enough

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Last February to much fanfare, the oil company Tesoro—a firm with big plans for oil trains in the Northwest—announced that it would voluntarily replace older tank cars with newer models.  In the technical parlance of the rail industry, the firm meant that they would upgrade or replace the legacy DOT-111 tank cars to be compliant with the CPC-1232 standard.

The idea sounded promising at first blush, but a closer inspection reveals that Tesoro’s move was more about posturing than public safety. The upgraded standards the company is trumpeting are far from safe enough—a reality that was shortly made clear by a massive oil train fire in downtown Lynchburg, Virginia involving these same tank cars just two months after Tesoro’s announcement. As the flaming oil wreckage in the James River demonstrated, Tesoro’s proposal was little more than a cheapskate’s way of continuing business as usual despite powerful evidence that much more is needed.

To see why the standard favored by Tesoro isn’t good enough, here’s a look at the details.

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Sightline on Kinder Morgan and Columbia River Energy Schemes

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If you’re following Sightline’s work on Northwest fossil fuel exports, you may enjoy listening to this radio segment I did recently on KBOO, a community radio station in Portland. The piece is around 45 minutes long, which allows time to explore many of the dimensions that we covered in our recent report, The Facts about … Read more

How Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton Made Oil Trains Less Safe

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Oil trains are not safe—a string of cinematic explosions has made that clear—and they’re not nearly as tightly regulated as they should be. This regulatory lapse isn’t just a one-off failure of the federal agencies charged with oversight; we’re in a jam that’s been decades in the making. Since Ronald Reagan, in fact.

When the feds released draft rules for oil trains this past July, they also published a draft Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA). Though it’s technical and often-overlooked, the RIA is a hugely important document that weighs the benefits to the public against the costs to the private sector of new rules—rules that might require tank car upgrades, train braking improvements, safer rail routing, and speed restrictions. This cost-benefit analysis for federal rules designed to protect people and the environment has long been a tactic favored business conservatives, and it’s been the law of the land since 1982 when then-President Reagan required by executive order that federal rules pass a cost-benefit test.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton affirmed and expanded Reagan’s regulatory legacy with Executive Order 12866, so that nowadays agencies must quantify the anticipated present and future benefits and costs as accurately as possible—and then proceed with a new rule only if the benefits justify the costs. All of which may sound sensible enough, but consider this: that means the benefit of you being alive is evaluated in the same equation that measures the oil industry’s profit margin. And with exploding trains, that’s not just hyperbole.

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Oil Trains: The Industry Speaks for Itself

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A year and a half after an oil train inferno ended 47 lives in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, the crude-by-rail industry rolls on, virtually unimpeded. It’s hard not to feel horrified when, one after another, we register the place names of oil train explosions—Aliceville, Alabama; Casselton, North Dakota; Lynchburg, Virginia—as grim warnings of what could happen in so many other North American communities.

Government regulators have been slow to act, their responses painfully milquetoast. As a result, much of what I do involves research into the often-complex details of federal rulemaking procedures, rail car design standards, insurance policies, and the like—all the issues that Sightline is shining a light on.

Yet on some level it’s not about any of that. It’s about a reckless and unaccountable oil industry that—in the most literal and obvious way—profits by putting our lives at risk. Every time I hear one of their accountability-shirking lines, I can’t help recalling images from those tragedies and near-tragedies. The juxtaposition is so startling that we decided to undertake a small photo project to capture it. We hope that you’ll find the following useful in your own work, and if so, that you’ll share the images with your own networks.

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What Do Oil Train Explosions Cost?

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Given the nasty tendency for oil trains to explode when they derail, it’s probably worth asking what a catastrophic accident might cost. No doubt, the thousands of communities visited daily by oil trains would like to know what sort of financial risks they are exposed to. Unfortunately for these governments, the available data suggest that a reasonable worst-case-scenario explosion could do several billion dollars of damage—sums far in excess of railroad insurance coverage.

But how many billions are we talking about?

The Big Problem with Letting Small Railroads Haul Oil

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The disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec—where 47 people were killed by a Bakken oil train derailment—is commonly understood to have resulted from a train slipping its brakes and then rolling downhill into town where it crashed disastrously. It was a tragedy, but it should not be considered just a mechanical accident.

In truth, it was a self-reinforcing chain of events and conditions caused by underinvestment, lack of maintenance, and staff cutbacks. And it’s a lesson the Northwest should heed because it illuminates the risks of allowing small regional and short line railroads to pick up unit trains of crude oil from bigger railroads like BNSF and transport them short distances to refineries and terminals. The Northwest is home to at least two small railroads with big oil-by-rail aspirations. One already hauls oil trains several times a week through Portland and small towns in northwest Oregon while the other, plagued by a string of recent derailments, aims to service no fewer than three terminals at the Port of Grays Harbor.

The story from Quebec—of what happened to the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic (MMA) railroad—is the story of a disaster waiting to happen. MMA was a regional railroad assembled in 2002 by a holding company from the assets of bankrupt Iron Road Railways, which owned four small railroads operating in Maine, Vermont, and Quebec. MMA had struggled financially from the start just as its major customers in the forestry industry also struggled. It went through a series of cutbacks to staff and maintenance.

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Lecture: The Thin Green Line

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Last week I gave a talk at Western Washington University about the massive coal, oil, and gas export projects slated for sites throughout the Pacific Northwest. Over the course of about 45 minutes I explored the changes confronting this region, as well as some of the opportunities we have to act as a sort of … Read more

Event: “The Thin Green Line” in Bellingham

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Next week, I’ll be in Bellingham at Western Washington University talking about the massive coal, oil, and gas export projects slated for sites throughout the Pacific Northwest—or, as we at Sightline have come to call our region, the Thin Green Line. It’s the place that stands between big energy companies’ inland fossil fuel stores and … Read more

How State Public Money Pays for Coal Exports and Oil Trains

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Communities across Oregon and Washington are growing increasingly agitated about the risks of fossil fuel export. Proposed coal terminals generated unprecedented opposition from local residents and, more recently, dramatic increases in oil train traffic have many questioning the grave safety risks associated with a cargo so prone to explode. Yet at the very same time, … Read more

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