The Northwest's Pipeline on Rails Archives | Page 9 of 9

US Oil Exports: Three Basic Pictures

November 6, 2013 by SwatchJunkies

As new debates over pipelines and oil trains heat up, I’ve been asked by all kinds of folks about the nature and history of US oil exports. So as a reference, here’s a quick look at some of the fundamentals. The US exports very little crude oil. Yet shipments of refined petroleum products—gasoline, jet fuel, … Read more

Exploding Death Trains in Our Midst: Should We Worry?

October 24, 2013 by SwatchJunkies

It’s been scarcely three months since an oil train in Quebec exploded catastrophically, killing 47 people and leveling several blocks of a town. Then, last weekend, another oil-bearing train derailed resulting in another huge explosion:

Residents for miles around saw and heard a “large fireball” shortly after 1 a.m., [fire chief] Phelan said. “There’s been no explosion or similar event like that since.”

As before, local emergency responders were unable to put out the fire because it was simply too dangerous:

Fire officials say they have little choice but to let the fuel burn itself off, resulting in a dark, billowing cloud of smoke that remained hanging over Gainford throughout the day.

“…it’s safer just to let it flare until the product is consumed,” said Phalen, estimating the time required for burn-off to be between 24 and 72 hours.

Read more

Big Tesoro Pipeline Spill in North Dakota

October 10, 2013 by SwatchJunkies

From the same folks who want to build a gargantuan oil-by-rail facility on the Columbia River, comes this news today: More than 20,000 barrels of crude oil have spewed out of a Tesoro Corp. oil pipeline in a wheat field in northwestern North Dakota, the state Health Department said Thursday. State environmental geologist Kris Roberts … Read more

What Caused the Lac-Mégantic Oil Train To Explode?

September 18, 2013 by SwatchJunkies

Canadian PM Stephen Harper survey the damage Lac-Mégantic the day after the explosion. Photo credit Stephen Harper, cc.

Last week saw a profusion of head-scratching news stories about July’s catastrophic oil train explosion in Quebec after the Transportation Safety Board of Canada announced that the tanker cars had been mislabeled. It turns out that although the rail cars were correctly classified as containing a “dangerous good,” a label that applies to all types of crude oil, they were incorrectly designated as PG III, the least dangerous sub-category, when they should have been labeled as the more dangerous PG II. (PG I is the most dangerous type.)

Mislabeling is a problem, to be sure, but it’s hardly the main issue. What none of the media accounts properly explained was why the crude oil—which does not normally explode—was so dangerous to begin with.

What we can learn from digging into initial reports from Canadian safety investigators is that the train was bearing crude oil from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota, the same type of oil that is scaling up for massive increases in rail shipping in the Northwest. It’s also clear that the oil had a relatively low flash point for crude, which means that it would have ignited at lower temperatures. But at this point, we don’t know a lot more about the evidently deadly composition of the product.

Some experts speculate that the culprit may be hydrogen sulfide, a colorless, flammable, and extremely hazardous gas that is sometimes associated with Bakken oil. According to the oil industry, hydrogen sulfide is explosive when mixed with air, and it can cause severe corrosion to oil transport equipment, including pipelines.

A Gateway for Petcoke

August 19, 2013 by SwatchJunkies

You often hear it said that coal is the world’s dirtiest fuel, which isn’t quite right. There’s actually an even dirtier fuel out there, petroleum coke. Often called “petcoke,” it’s a dense coal-like and carbon-intense fuel that is the byproduct of refining certain kinds of oils. It figures into the Northwest’s fossil fuel debate in a way that links coal exports to the region’s changing oil supplies.

The clearest link is perhaps at Cherry Point in northwest Washington, where a large refinery owned by BP sits practically next door to the site of the proposed Gateway Pacific export terminal. Although Gateway Pacific is usually, and correctly, referred to as a coal export terminal, the site’s plans clearly call for handling petcoke in the initial phases of operations. (In fact, calcined petroleum coke is one of the non-coal “dry bulk commodities” the project supporters refer to when they are trying to draw attention away from coal.)

Conveniently, the BP refinery at Cherry Point annually produces 800,000 tons of calcined coke as a salable byproduct of its refining process. BP currently ships its petcoke out by rail to industrial users in North America and beyond, but having a petcoke-ready export terminal in the neighborhood would surely add a financial incentive for BP to dial up its petcoke production. The same goes for the Shell Refinery at Anacortes, Washington, which also produces petcoke that it now ships by rail to a smelter in Kitimat, British Columbia.

Huge Oil Train Explosion

July 7, 2013 by SwatchJunkies

Editor’s note: this blog post was updated on October 1, 2013.

One hopes the grim news from Quebec is not a preview for the Northwest. Early yesterday morning an oil train in the province derailed, causing an explosion with deadly results:

Four of the cars – which each carried 30,000 gallons of North Dakotan crude oil – caught fire and blew up in a fireball that mushroomed many hundreds of feet into the air. It destroyed dozens of buildings, many of them totally flattened…

Lapointe said it was hard to calculate the number of possible victims because the area was still too dangerous for police to examine properly.

[sightline-embed]

Moving oil by rail has become increasingly common over the last couple of years, and the Northwest is poised to become a major center of oil-by-rail shipments.

As Sightline documented in our recent report, The Northwest’s Pipeline on Rails, oil trains are already arriving several times a week at three locations in the region, while eight other sites are planning to build facilities to enable oil-by-rail deliveries. If all of the projects were built and operated at capacity, they would move nearly 800,000 barrels of crude oil per day on the Northwest’s rail system. Sightline estimates that would require 11 loaded oil trains per day.

Media outlets are reporting that the train in Quebec was carrying crude oil from North Dakota, which is almost certainly the same Bakken Formation oil destined for Northwest refineries and port terminals. The cause of the explosion is not yet clear, but most coverage suggests that the train had been parked for the night and was without a driver when it began moving.

What You Can Do About Oil-By-Rail in the Northwest

June 26, 2013 by SwatchJunkies

Editor’s note: this blog post was updated on February 19, 2014.

Yesterday Sightline published a new analysis on all the oil-by-rail projects planned and underway in the Northwest. The breakdown looks like this:

Focus on the second-to-last line. The Tesoro/Savage project at the Port of Vancouver, Washington, is huge. At 360,000 barrels per day, it’s bigger than many pipelines. It’s nearly as big as all the other projects put together.

And it’s not a done deal.

The Port’s first public meeting with the project proponent is this Thursday, June 27th at 9:30 a.m. Columbia Riverkeeper is encouraging people to attend and raising tough questions about the plans.

There are, indeed, some puzzling dimensions of that project.