Do Crude Oil Shipments Make Rail Less Safe?

• The movement of crude oil by rail is expanding rapidly but still represents a small fraction of the hazardous goods transported by rail in North America.
• The devastation caused by an oil train accident in Lac-Megantic, Quebec should galvanize railroads, shippers and regulators to improve rail safety for all hazardous freight. However, it does not justify banning oil-by-rail.

It’s been nearly two months since a train loaded with crude oil from North Dakota derailed and exploded in the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic, Quebec, killing an estimated 47 residents. In the interval since the accident, the relevant authorities have focused on ascertaining the cause of the accident and determining how best to improve rail safety. However, there has also been another, less-customary conversation about whether oil in general, and the specific oil on this train, might be too dangerous to transport by rail at all. That conversation would benefit from some context that appears to be absent.

Both conversations began with a tragedy in a place I recognized immediately. Ten years ago my wife and I passed through Lac-Megantic and drove along the Chaudière river that originates there, on its way to the St. Lawrence. It’s an area of natural beauty and historical significance. The images of destruction and of oil spilled in the river were gut-wrenching.

The investigation is still underway, but it seems significant that the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) of the US Department of Transportation has already issued an Emergency Order banning the practice of leaving such trains unattended, pending the development of better procedures for securing them safely. Canadian authorities are reviewing their regulations and enforcement, as well as revisiting questions about the specific type of tank car in which the oil was carried. The Wall St. Journal reported that the FRA is also  looking into the testing and classification of crude oil shipments, to ensure that the tank cars used to transport different crude oils are suited to the task. Meanwhile, the rail operator involved in the accident has filed for bankruptcy on both sides of the border.

The second conversation, apparently based on a belief that it is possible to cease our use of petroleum entirely if we only have the will, is occurring in a fact vacuum. Understanding why that particular batch of crude oil was on that specific track on that day requires unpacking a nested set of factors that starts with the fact that oil still accounts for 33% of total global energy consumption, but more importantly supplies 93% of transportation energy. Numerous forecasts, including the latest from the US Department of Energy, anticipate no reduction in global oil use through 2040. Although we’ve displaced much of the oil formerly used to generate electricity and have greatly improved vehicle fuel efficiency, our most successful alternative transportation fuel, ethanol--no stranger to rail accidents--accounted for just 3% of US liquid fuel use last year, when adjusted for its lower energy content.

Although global oil movements are dominated by pipelines, tankers and barges, rail remains an important mode because of its flexibility. It’s also usually cheaper and more efficient than trucking for all but short distances--and safer, too, despite accidents like this one. Although the rapid recent growth of crude-oil-by-rail and its role in the Keystone XL pipeline debate have attracted significant attention, last year’s 234,000 tank-car loads of crude made up less than half of total US petroleum rail shipments and were dwarfed by over 1.5 million tank-car loads of chemicals hauled by rail in 2012.

Crude oil, especially light crudes like those produced from the Bakken and Eagle Ford shales, is flammable, and thus constitutes hazardous cargo. However, railroads routinely carry a wide variety of flammable and otherwise hazardous materials, including propane, gasoline, benzene, ethanol, chlorine gas, sulfuric acid and a range of other chemicals. Safety is not  determined by the cargo--if it was, none of these substances would be on trains--but by the combination of the equipment used to carry it, the rules and processes that dictate how to handle it, and the people who operate these systems. It’s no coincidence that these are the areas on which the investigations and preliminary regulatory responses have focused.

Then there are the market and logistical circumstances that resulted in a St. John, New Brunswick refinery that supplies both Canadian and US consumers and normally processes oil imported by tanker, acquiring oil produced in North Dakota and shipped halfway across the continent by rail. North American oil production is expanding rapidly, with significant economic and energy security benefits. Much of this new oil is found in places not adequately served by the large network of existing pipelines. That situation may eventually be rectified, but in the meantime the mismatch between growing landlocked oil supplies and limited pipeline outlets for them has created an opportunity for rail operators reeling from the much larger shale-gas-induced decline in coal shipments. Serving that need keeps people and trains employed. And that, ultimately, is why a train carrying Bakken crude was on a track in Lac-Megantic this July.

I can scarcely imagine what the survivors of the Lac-Megantic disaster and the families of the victims have been going through for the last two months. Their lives will never be the same. But whatever the cause of the accident is determined to have been--human error, mechanical failure, aging infrastructure or something else--it was not caused by the oil in those tank cars.

In the aftermath of an accident like this, the best thing we can do is to determine why it happened and apply those lessons to make rail transport of all hazardous cargoes safer.  Attempting to use the tragedy to advance a social cause such as “ending our reliance on oil” might be alluring to some, but the communities through which such freight travels in the course of keeping our economy running will benefit much more from the former course of action.

A different version of this posting was previously published on Energy Trends Insider. 

Crude Oil Rides the Rails

Last month's publication of the State Department's latest environmental impact report on the Keystone XL pipeline project has sparked great interest in the logistics of shipping crude oil by rail. As described in a long article in the Washington Post, the availability of a rail option for oil sands crude could prove to be a crucial element in determining whether the pending decision to permit the pipeline to cross the US border would actually affect Canada's oil sands output, and thus its greenhouse gas emissions. As the article makes clear, however, oil's rail trend is already well underway , thanks to the surge of "tight oil" production from shale formations. Moving crude oil by train is experiencing a "Back to the Future" moment.

Oil shipments in rail cars are nothing new; the practice dates back to the earliest days of the oil industry. In fact, control of key railroad routes for oil and petroleum products was an important aspect of the US government's anti-trust case against the original Standard Oil a century ago. My first exposure to crude-by-rail was in the 1980s, when significant quantities of heavy crude from California's San Joaquin valley were routinely transported to Los Angeles refineries by dedicated "unit trains", because there wasn't sufficient pipeline capacity available.

The same dynamic applies today, with the rapid expansion of tight oil production in North Dakota's Bakken fields quickly outstripping the capacity of the state's few existing pipelines to transport the oil to market. A tank car loading rack requires much less time and money to build than a new pipeline or pipeline expansion. US railroads are also eager for the traffic, since coal deliveries, which accounted for 45% of US rail traffic in 2011, fell by nearly 11% last year as natural gas eroded coal's share of power generation. Meanwhile oil shipments by rail grew by 46% in 2012.

Precise data on just how much crude oil is currently moving by rail are hard to find. The American Association of Railroads doesn't differentiate between crude oil and refined petroleum products, which until recently accounted for most oil-related rail shipments. The US Energy Information Agency (EIA) reported last summer that crude oil had grown to roughly 30% of total petroleum rail deliveries, which would equate to around 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) on average for 2012. Yet EIA's analysis of recent trends suggested that crude-by-rail increased by nearly 250,000 bpd last year alone. The CEO of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe recently indicated that his railroad's total oil-related shipments alone could expand to around 1 million bpd, roughly double today's level.

It would be easy to conclude that all this growth reflects a temporary expedient, until North American pipeline capacity can be expanded and realigned to match rising output and the reversal of long-standing import trends. That view is clearly not shared by oil companies and traders who are lining up to purchase or lease new tank cars for this service. Perhaps that's because rail provides a degree of flexibility that would be nearly impossible to match by pipeline. For example, it creates an opportunity to supply domestic crude to East Coast refineries like Delta Airlines' Trainer, Pennsylvania facility, which had previously become uneconomical to operate on a diet of imported crude cargoes. Similarly, even if a pipeline from North Dakota to the San Francisco Bay Area could be justified economically, it would likely never receive the necessary permits. Yet Valero's Benicia refinery might soon receive up to 70,000 barrels per day of Bakken crude by rail.

Railroads are also surprisingly efficient. At an industry average of 480 ton-miles per gallon, my analysis indicates that shipping a barrel of crude from North Dakota to a refinery in either Houston or Philadelphia consumes a quantity of diesel fuel equivalent to just 1% of the energy content of the oil, while adding slightly over 1% to the typical well-to-wheels emissions for gasoline refined from it. That's higher than for pipelines, but not by enough to render the option unattractive.

Pipelines remain the preferred option for moving high volumes of oil safely over long distances and, when capacity exists, are usually cheaper for shippers. However, rapidly shifting sources of production and the high capital costs of new pipelines, combined with an increasingly challenging regulatory environment, could provide a durable opportunity for oil-by-rail, just as it has for moving petroleum products and ethanol by train. 

A slightly different version of this posting was previously published on the website of Pacific Energy Development Corporation.