The Thin Green Line Is Stopping Coal and Oil in Their Tracks

The Thin Green Line Is Stopping Coal and Oil in Their Tracks

Northwest communities have won key battles. Can they win the war?

 

Eric de Place (@Eric_deP) and Deric Gruen (@DericGruen) on August 13, 2015

SightLine Institute

 

This post is part of the research project: Northwest Coal & Oil Exports

“Everybody outside the Northwest thinks that’s where energy projects go to die.”

“Everybody outside the Northwest thinks that’s where energy projects go to die.” That’s the reputation our region has earned as an increasing number of proposed coal and oil export projects have encountered ferocious opposition. It’s what the backer of a proposed oil refinery in Longview, Washington, told reporters earlier this year after his company’s stealth proposal was outed by environmental groups.

The Cascadia region has proven to be extraordinarily challenging for those who would turn it into a major carbon energy export hub—so much so that Sightline has taken to calling it the Thin Green Line.

Since 2012, a staggering number of schemes have proposed to move large volumes of carbon-intense fuels through Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia to Asian markets. A recent Sightline analysis shows that proposed and newly permitted energy projects in the region would amount to the carbon equivalent of more than five Keystone XL Pipelines.

But in big ways and small—from Coos Bay, Oregon, to Prince Rupert, British Columbia—the Thin Green Line has held fast. Big energy projects have faced delays, uncertainty, mounting costs…and then failure. A review of these projects makes clear just how successful the region has been in denying permission to dirty energy companies as it stays true to its heritage as a center of clean energy, sustainability, and forward thinking.

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Crude Tank Car Changes from Tesoro & BNSF; Adm. Papp Rues sHellNO

Tesoro building crude rail cars stronger than new US rules require

By Reuters | 18 May, 2015

HOUSTON: US refiner Tesoro Corp has ordered new crude oil railcars with features that surpass safety standards that federal regulators set this month, executives told Reuters.

The 210 tank cars being built in northern Louisiana are so-called pressure cars, with the same design as those that carry liquid petroleum gases such as propane and butane, gas cargoes that are more flammable than crude oil.

They will be delivered in the coming months after being ordered in early 2014. 

The new federal rules for all crude and ethanol railcars built after Oct. 1 of this year do not require strength to the level of a pressure car, but are stronger than the standards adopted by the industry in 2011. ….

….Tesoro isn't the only refiner that didn't wait for word from the US DOT to order stronger cars.

Phillips 66 confirmed to Reuters that it also last year ordered 350 non-pressurized new cars that mostly match the new DOT standard. Those cars will be delivered by year-end, the company said. …     more here

Customer concerns prompt BNSF to withdraw plan to buy tank cars

Progressive Railroading  May 19, 2015

BNSF Railway Co. has dropped an earlier announced plan to acquire up to 5,000 next-generation crude-oil tank cars, the Class I said in a recent letter to customers.

Last year, the Class I indicated it would purchase new tank cars to help settle marketplace concerns over crude-by-rail safety. But conversations with customers in recent months convinced BNSF executives to change direction.....

....The decision to drop that plan comes two weeks after the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) announced its final rule on crude-by-rail safety. The rules require that tank cars built after Oct. 1 must meet design and performance requirements for a new class of tank car, the DOT-117, while existing cars must be retrofitted to meet the new standards. The rule also calls for the replacement of DOT-111 tank cars.
 
In their letter, Bobb and Fox said BNSF would work with customers to make the transition to the next generation of cars or retrofit cars into shale crude service as soon as practicable.....

..... The executives added that they have concerns about USDOT's mandate for electronically controlled pneumatic brakes....  more here

Note:  what he probably meant was 'effective'!

Shell Arctic oil drilling reaction ‘overblown’ – US envoy

Admiral Papp says conditional approval to explore polar waters just ‘another step’, as ‘kayaktivists’ protest in Seattle

RTCC      18 May 2015    By Alex Pashley

America’s special representative for the Arctic has said coverage of Shell’s tentative green light to drill in the region has been exaggerated.

“The stories have been a little bit overblown where we are with Shell,” Admiral Robert Papp told reporters in a press call on Monday.

“This is properly Department of Interior business and what they done is approved another step in the process for Shell to drill in the Arctic, not final approval.”

Last week, the federal department cleared the Anglo-Dutch company to restart operations off the coast of Alaska, three years after it was forced to halt them, following a string of safety failures including an oil rig fire.

Bill McKibben founder of 350.org, which has coordinated a global fossil fuel divestment movement said the decision amounted to ”one of the greatest acts of corporate irresponsibility in the planet’s history”.

Green groups have warned of potential spills in the fragile icy conditions without sufficient guards to respond to leaks…..     more here

Info from the Port of Vancouver

From Don Steinke:  The Columbian has done 600 stories on the oil terminal in the last 18 months.

Their latest is a in depth analysis of the culture of secrecy at the Port.

Please vote in the poll in the fourth link.

http://www.columbian.com/news/2015/may/17/port-vancouver-secrecy-oil-terminal-public-in-dark/

http://www.columbian.com/news/2015/may/18/skids-greased-for-oil-terminal-behind-closed-doors/

http://www.columbian.com/news/2015/may/19/port-vancouveoil-terminal-lease-gusher-of-backlash/

http://www.columbian.com/polls/2015/may/what-do-you-think-port-should-do-after-series/results/

NPR: A Hard Look At The Risks Of Transporting Oil On Rail Tanker Cars

NPR: A Hard Look At The Risks Of Transporting Oil On Rail Tanker Cars

Marcus Stern has spent the past year investigating the practice. Recent accidents in Canada and U.S. show that the cars aren't built for carrying so much oil, he says, and tracks are deteriorating.

Feb 25, 2015  Copyright © 2015 NPR.    For personal, noncommercial use only. Audio at site


DAVE DAVIES, HOST:  This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who’s off this week. Earlier this month, a train carrying crude oil derailed in West Virginia, sending 27 cars off the track, spilling oil across the landscape and into a nearby creek, and causing explosions and fires that burned for days. And it isn’t the only such accident in recent years.

(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSION)

UNIDENTIFIED OPERATOR: Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Oh, it just blew up. A train blew up. You need fire and ambulance – everything – right away.

DAVIES: That’s a 911 call from a derailment and explosion near Casselton, N.D., in December of 2013. Five months before that, a tank car derailment in Canada sparked fires that killed 47 people.

Our guest, investigative reporter Marcus Stern, has spent the past year looking into the risks of transporting oil on rail tanker cars, a practice which has expanded dramatically in the past eight years. His stories focus in particular on how regulators have responded, or failed to, following the tragedy in Canada. Marcus Stern won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his investigation of San Diego Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham. His reporting on the risks of rail transportation of crude oil was a joint effort of the environmental website InsideClimate News and The Weather Channel.  [Editor: See BOOM: North America’s Explosive Oil-by-Rail Problem]

Well, Marcus Stern, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let’s begin with this horrific accident that happened in the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic – or at least that’s how it’s pronounced in this country. I’m sure the French pronunciation’s different. This was July of 2013. Tell us what happened.

MARCUS STERN: There was a train that was hauling crude oil – about 2.6 million gallons – and it had a little bit of a mechanical problem. And so the railroad instructed the lone conductor – the lone crewmember -to leave it overnight with the engines running unattended. And he called a cab and went into town, into Lac-Megantic, to get sleep and spend the night at a hotel. And in the middle of the night, the brakes failed on the locomotives. And there were several locomotives. And it started down a long incline. And by the time it reached Lac-Megantic, seven miles down the hill, it was doing 60 miles an hour. It hit a curve there. It derailed and several of the railcars exploded. Fireballs went shooting several-hundred feet into the air. And a tide of flaming oil flowed in every direction, including the direction of a nearby bar/restaurant that was full of patrons. It was one o’clock in the morning on a Saturday night – a beautiful July night. And it immediately engulfed the bar/restaurant in flames. And 47 people were killed. The remains of five people – no remains were found of five of the people.

DAVIES: Because the heat was so intense?

STERN: Yes, it just vaporized these people.

DAVIES: Now, this accident was in Canada. But we’re seeing a lot more rail traffic of tanker cars in the United States. And I guess this oil actually had come from the United States. Why are we seeing so much more tanker traffic and crude oil being carried on railroads?

STERN: What happened is in 2005, roughly, there were advance – new developments in fracking technology that allowed the producers to pull light crude oil from about two miles beneath the ground in North Dakota. And suddenly that was available to them. And they could start pulling it out. They were pulling out hundreds of thousands of gallons of barrels a day. The problem is that, you know, while they suddenly became – you know, had this huge resource, and they now were Texas. They were Texas without pipelines. They had all the oil production of Texas – not quite as much, but they’re now number two to Texas – but they didn’t have any of the infrastructure in place. And so the – very cleverly, they turned to the rails because the rails were sitting sort of idle and not used very much except for by grain farmers. And also, you had refineries on the East Coast that were actually getting ready to shut down because they couldn’t compete with the Gulf Coast refineries that were using domestic crude oil because the East Coast refineries were using oil purchased on the world market at a higher price. So by pulling it out of the ground, putting it on the rails, and sending it to the East Coast refineries, it created a renaissance – an industrial renaissance, if you will – worth tens of billions of dollars, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars. So it was a huge, big, good business story until the trains started to blow up.

DAVIES: So the fast solution to a lack of pipelines to get the crude to refineries was to put it on tanker cars. Give us a sense of how dramatically the rise is in, you know, crude oil being shipped by tanker car.