Opponents of pipelines now want to halt rail oil shipments after 4 wrecks in 3 weeks

Bloomberg/Fuel Fix:
Canadian National Railway Co. is building a 1,500-foot long track to bypass a burning train that derailed Saturday in northern Ontario, while BNSF Railway Co. crews were working Sunday to reopen track in rural Illinois after a train carrying oil derailed three days ago.

CN crews teamed with outside specialists are fighting the blaze after an eastbound train carrying crude oil derailed and caught fire around 2:45 a.m. near Gogama, about 600 kilometers north of Toronto, cutting off rail traffic between Toronto and Winnipeg, Manitoba. The BNSF train jumped the tracks Thursday afternoon near Galena, Illinois, about 160 miles west of Chicago, according to the railroad, a unit of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

The accidents bring to four the number of oil train wrecks in North America in the past three weeks, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. The environment group is calling for a halt to transport of oil by rail, which has surged since 2009 with the boom in crude production from shale.

“We need a moratorium on oil trains,” Mollie Matteson, a senior scientist at the center, which has fought to protect wildlife for 26 years, said in a March 7 statement. “The oil and railroad industries are playing Russian roulette with people’s lives and our environment.”

The BNSF train was carrying oil from North Dakota’s Bakken shale formation for Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. Twenty-one of the train’s 105 cars, which include two sand cars as buffers, jumped the tracks Thursday afternoon. The U.S. Department of Transportation said 14 cars were in a pileup and half of those were punctured. Emergency responders evacuated a 1-mile radius, which contained six homes. No injuries have been reported.

BNSF plans to reopen its mainline track Monday, Mike Trevino, a spokesman for the railroad, said in a phone interview Sunday.

North American oil producers have increased their reliance on rail as new pipelines failed to keep pace with a surge of production from shale. The typical rail car carries about 700 barrels of oil, according to data posted on BNSF’s website. The number of oil carloads rose more than 40-fold from 2009 through 2013, when 435,560 carloads were shipped, and kept climbing last year to an estimated 500,000, according to the Association of American Railroads.
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This seems typical of the bad faith of the anti energy left.  They just look for an excuse to keep oil in the ground and do not care about the consequences to everyday people who need that fuel for transportation and heating during a bitter winter.  The derailments make the case for expanded pipeline capacity.  It may take a regime change in Washington to restore common sense to decisions on pipelines.

I blame the anti energy left for the current situation and more attention needs to be brought to the results of their opposition to pipelines.

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