West Coast CBR shipments stable, for now
There is “big potential” to expand crude by rail shipments to West Coast ports and to California, but building the infrastructure “has proven painstakingly slow,” writes RBN Energy LLC analyst Rusty Braziel.
There is “big potential” to expand crude by rail shipments to West Coast ports and to California, but building the infrastructure “has proven painstakingly slow,” writes RBN Energy LLC analyst Rusty Braziel.
Could emergency service that’s been used worldwide be applied on a massive scale for California?
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) issued on July 30, 2015 a final rule to prevent unattended trains that carry crude oil, ethanol, poisonous by inhalation (PIH), toxic by inhalation (TIH), and other highly flammable contents from rolling away. Railroad employees who are responsible for securing a train will now be permanently required to communicate with another qualified individual trained on the railroad’s securement requirements to verify that trains and equipment are properly secured.
Bakken crude oil hauled in unit trains may disappear by 2017, according to an analysis conducted by RBN Energy LLC.
The wait for a new tank car specification is over. Now comes the “fun” part: Retrofits to older cars, and potentially onerous operating rules.
A BNSF crude oil unit train derailed near the small North Dakota town of Heimdal, at 7:30 a.m. CDT on May 6, 2015, resulting in explosions and fire.
The chain reaction fireballs that attended the Feb. 16, 2015 derailment of a CSX unit oil train in populated West Virginia probably blinded observers to the significance of the concurrent derailment and explosions of a CN oil train in a remote and uninhabited area of northern Ontario. Most reports treated the two events as equals, given that both trains consisted of recently manufactured CPC-1232 tank cars loaded with crude oil.