The oil industry’s lead trade group has come up with new standards for testing and classifying crude shipped by rail. As with earlier orders from the American government, the industry’s standards generally leave it to individual companies to decide how often to test crude in order to gauge its danger. Hazardous-materials shipments are supposed to […]
Comment: Pick your choice for crude transport – pipeline, train, truck or ship
Crude oil is moving around the world, around North America, around pristine wilderness, around our cities and towns. It’s going to keep moving, so what is the safest way to move it? The short answer is: truck worse than train worse than pipeline worse than boat (Oilprice.com). But that’s only for human death and property […]
Time to phase out old rail cars
The Daily Journal is reporting the oil industry and the railroads are giving U.S. regulators a plan to phase out a type of older tank car connected to fiery accidents, including the one a year ago in Quebec that killed 47 people. The publisher of the story was talking on a condition of anonymity to […]
Comment: Fox Guarding Henhouse
How did it get missed for the last ten years?” That was the question Deborah Hersman, chair of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), posed to a panel of industry representatives back in April about how the rail industry had missed the fact that Bakken oil is more explosive than traditional crude oil. “How do we […]