Oil train risk is serious (Jump to the counterpoint argument)
Stricter rules, upgraded equipment are necessary
By Michael E. Kraft, Tribune News Service
Hardly a month goes by without news of a train derailment that spills oil or of an underground pipeline that leaks somewhere in the nation. We’ve been lucky that most had relatively minor impacts.
Increasingly, however, we are seeing major accidents that pollute the land or rivers or that threaten public health and safety.
In February, a train carrying 3 million gallons of North Dakota crude oil derailed in West Virginia, with 26 rail cars leaving the tracks and many catching fire. The accident required evacuation of hundreds of families and also polluted a tributary of the historic Kanawha River. An oil train derailment, explosion, and fire in Casselton, North Dakota, in late 2013 required a mass evacuation of the town’s residents.
Such accidents speak to the danger of transporting highly flammable oil and gas around the country through often-antiquated infrastructure in need of modernization and enhanced safety requirements. Some improvements have been made to rail car safety, but more needs to be done with the tracks themselves as well as the cars.
As extensive as our existing pipeline networks are, they have insufficient capacity to handle the increasing amounts of oil and gas being produced.
New pipelines have been proposed, with most of them receiving far less media coverage than the contentious Keystone XL pipeline. But even if approved, the construction of new pipelines could take years. This is why we rely on rail, truck and barge transportation rather than pipelines to move oil to refineries.
The increased volume of oil being shipped by rail, sometimes called “virtual pipelines,” is astonishing. In 2008, only 9,500 rail carloads were shipped to U.S. refineries. By 2014, the number had soared to more than 400,000, or 42 times as much.
Why the enormous increase in rail traffic? In the last six years, domestic oil production leaped by more than 50 percent. It reached 9.4 million barrels a day by 2015. There are too few pipelines to handle that volume, so producers use rail instead. Fully two-thirds of North Dakota’s shale oil field production is being shipped by rail.
Studies by the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service concluded that the increase in rail shipment raises serious concerns about the way oil is packaged in rail cars, the use of trains carrying as many as 80 to 120 oil cars, and the capacity for emergency response, particularly in rural areas.
It is thus no surprise that accidents have surged. According to federal data, between 1975 and 2012, railroads spilled a total of 800,000 gallons of crude oil. But in 2013 alone the amount of oil spilled totaled over one million gallons.
These accidents tell us that stricter rules, both federal and state, are imperative to protect the public and the environment. The Obama administration is developing new regulations that could help. Many states are considering similar actions.
We also should make sure that key federal and state agencies, such as the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, in the U.S. Department of Transportation, have the resources and staffs to do their jobs.
Many have long been poorly financed and understaffed. The PHMSA, for example, has a budget of just $200 million and only 500 employees to oversee 40,000 companies engaged in the commercial transportation of petroleum products and hazardous materials.
At a minimum, rail cars need to be better designed, and built with thicker steel, to carry flammable cargo. It is the industry’s own interest to take actions like this.
The oil car derailment and massive fire in Quebec in July 2013 killed 47 people and caused an estimated $1 billion in liability for the railroad. The United States and Canada should not continue to treat rail shipment of oil as though it poses no real danger.
Michael Kraft is professor emeritus of political science and public and environmental affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. His email address is kraftmuwgb.edu.
Safety is already key focus
U.S. transportation of oil has a stellar safety record
By Jack Gerard, Tribune News Service
Just like commercial airlines don’t make headlines for the thousands of flights that reach their destination safely each day, you won’t see much media coverage of the stellar safety rate achieved in all segments of America’s oil and natural gas industry. But it’s a reality with direct bearing on public policy.
Our nation’s liquid pipeline system transports more than 14 billion barrels of crude oil and petroleum products per year at a safety rate of 99.999 percent.
Oil shipped to the United States from elsewhere arrived without incident at that same rate over the last decade.
North America’s rail network moves 99.998 percent of hazardous materials — including crude oil — without incident. Refinery employees are up to five times less likely to be injured on the job than employees in other manufacturing sectors.
We did not achieve this record by chance. Since even one accident is too many, we work continuously with our partner industries and regulators to eliminate the last .001-.002 percent of risk from our operations using a comprehensive approach focused on prevention, mitigation and response.
The nation’s more than 192,000 miles of liquid pipeline are subject to rigorous standards of continual improvement.
The petroleum industry launched a new Pipeline Safety Excellence initiative in 2014 to better track and improve safety performance. The data show pipeline releases in public areas dropped by 57 percent between 2001 and 2013 — with two-thirds of incidents occurring inside operator facilities with limited access to the public — and operators continue to step up inspection spending and the deployment of advanced technology to detect threats to pipeline integrity.
Multiple stakeholders are committed to achieving a 100 percent safety rate for crude-by-rail, and a comprehensive approach is key.
As former Department of Transportation official Cynthia Quarterman stated, “Getting a new tank car is not a silver bullet; first we need to prevent derailments.”
Track inspections and operational practices are a critical part of the holistic strategy — based on science and data — that’s needed to improve safety in every aspect of the process.
Accident mitigation and response are also important. In 2011, the oil and natural gas industry helped lead a multi-industry effort to voluntarily improve the design of rail tank cars, but we didn’t stop there.
The same comprehensive approach has succeeded in improving safety in offshore drilling. Over the last five years, industry experts and regulators have worked together to examine every aspect of offshore safety.
To better prevent accidents, we revised existing standards and created new ones, including standards dealing with well design and blowout prevention. We also developed better tools for capping subsea wells, which are now are required to be pre-positioned for rapid deployment in the event of an incident. And we created the Center for Offshore Safety, which works closely with regulators and companies to foster a strong culture of safety in the industry.
These efforts received high praise from the co-chairs of President Barack Obama’s Oil Spill Commission, who agree that “offshore drilling is safer” now than in 2010.
That’s consistent with the long-term trajectory of America’s oil and natural gas industry which is one of continually improving safety, not to mention growing strength as a pillar of the American economy — supporting 9.8 million U.S. jobs and 8 percent of the U.S. economy.
Our potential as a global energy leader is rooted in our ability to safely develop and transport our game-changing energy resources safely 100 percent of the time. A comprehensive, science-based approach is the best way to get there.
Jack Gerard is president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute.
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