Forum on this subject at St. Paul's Lutheran Church on 2/11/16.
https://youtu.be/uTYEtcNIdZk

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Googled it. No one anywhere want oil shipped through their backyards, though everyone wants it in their tank. Odd that they rail it to Montreal before loading it, rather than having the tanker pick it up in Thunder Bay or wherever they have an appropriate port. There's a lot unseen in this game.

Canada does ship tar sand oil by tanker through the St. Lawrence. This has been a big political issue in Canada.

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Ah yes, I've heard of Jones act issues in other contexts. On the other hand, why would anyone but the US or Canada build Seawaymax vessels anyway?

It just seems odd that rail is cheaper than a ship that can 6 or 7 whole trainloads, even if it is expensive Jones Act shipping The rail system is run & maintained by expensive American labor, and it appears the cars are made domestically too (below). It "looks" like a level playing field.

http://wire.kapitall.com/investment-i ... nefit-from-crude-by-rail/

There is a pipeline proposal from Albany to Linden.

http://www.nj.com/morris/index.ssf/20 ... e_to_support_pilgrim.html

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Also, the Seaway is only open 9 months/year due to its tendency to freeze.

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Jones Act. Taking from one US port to another US port requires that a US flagged ship be used. The US Merchant marine is only about 4% of the total available shipping and is very expensive.

The Jones act is the reason cruise ship to Alaska leave out of Vancouver and not Seattle. It is also one of the reasons that Hawaii no longer grows their famous pineapples: Growers actually found it cheaper to fly their fruit to the lower 48 than to ship it by sea. Eventually, it was just cheaper to grow the pineapples in foreign countries.

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Any idea why Seawaymax oil tankers aren't used to bring it from Lake Superior to Atlantic ports?

If you want to get rid of oil trains, you will need to have pipelines, which are the safest way to transport petroleum. Currently there are no pipelines to bring crude from the Midwest to the refineries here in NJ and PA.




The oil is being shipped East because the refineries here are made to process light crude. The refineries in the southwest are built to process heavy crude from Mexico and Venezuela.

The oil from North Dakota is light and is displacing oil we would normally import from the Mid East. However, this oil tends to be 'gassy' with a high concentration of methane, ethane, butane, propane, etc. Even if it is de-gassed, Bakken oil is high in VOC (i.e. benzene). Its the gas and VOCs that makes the oil explosive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/opi ... danger-on-rails.html?_r=0

even Ny'ers feel threaten and they have the Hudson River as a barrier !

the video in the link is worth watching.

FEMA chose for the location of the derailment scenario a stretch of track adjacent to the New Jersey Turnpike and about a mile from downtown Jersey City. One side of the track is industrial and includes an electric substation. The other side is residential.

Better do that study on a day there are hundreds of people at Enos Jones Park or the elementary school (PS 5) within blocks of this rail line is in session. How's about that Spectra gas pipeline that runs through here?

http://www.wsj.com/articles/disaster- ... DDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond



Disaster Plans for Oil Trains

Federal officials devise scenario involving a train explosion to prepare officials for the worst








Oil trains traverse Jersey City, N.J., where officials are concerned about the potential for a spill. ENLARGE

Oil trains traverse Jersey City, N.J., where officials are concerned about the potential for a spill. Photo: Joe Jackson/The Wall Street Journal
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By
Russell Gold










April 13, 2015 7:54 p.m. ET
39 COMMENTS

Imagine a mile-long train transporting crude oil derailing on an elevated track in Jersey City, N.J., across the street from senior citizen housing and 2 miles from the mouth of the Holland Tunnel to Manhattan.

The oil ignites, creating an intense explosion and a 300-foot fireball. The blast kills 87 people right away, and sends 500 more to the hospital with serious injuries. More than a dozen buildings are destroyed. A plume of thick black smoke spreads north to New York?s Westchester County.

This fictional?but, experts say, plausible?scenario was developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in one of the first efforts by the U.S. government to map out what an oil-train accident might look like in an urban area. Agency officials unveiled it as part of an exercise last month to help local firefighters and emergency workers prepare for the kind of crude-by-rail accident that until now has occurred mostly in rural locations.

?Our job is to design scenarios that push us to the limit, and very often push us to the point of failure so that we can identify where we need to improve,? said FEMA spokesman Rafael Lemaitre. He said a second planning exercise is scheduled in June in a suburban area of Wisconsin.



ENLARGE


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Jersey City?s mayor, Steven Fulop, said the drill showed participants that they need to improve regional communication to cope with an oil-train accident.

?It would be a catastrophic situation for any urban area and Jersey City is one of the most densely populated areas in the entire country,? he said.

Railroad records show that about 20 oil trains a week pass through the county that contains Jersey City, and Mr. Fulop said the trains use the elevated track studied in the FEMA exercise. Even more trains hauling crude pass through other cities, including Chicago, Philadelphia and Minneapolis.

Rail shipments of oil have expanded to almost 374 million barrels last year from 20 million barrels in 2010, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Although low crude prices and safety issues have recently led to small declines in such traffic, trains carrying volatile oil from North Dakota and the Rocky Mountains continue to rumble toward refiners on the East, West and Gulf Coasts.

Several oil-train derailments have produced huge fireballs, including two in March in rural Illinois and Ontario. In 2013, a train carrying North Dakota crude derailed late at night in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, killing 47 people.



Edgardo Correa, of Jersey City, N.J., beneath railroad tracks that pass by his home. ENLARGE

Edgardo Correa, of Jersey City, N.J., beneath railroad tracks that pass by his home. Photo: Joe Jackson/The Wall Street Journal
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Regulators worry more about a serious accident in a densely populated area. ?The derailment scenario FEMA developed is a very real possibility and a very real concern,? said Susan Lagana, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Transportation. She said her agency was considering emergency orders to address such risks.

Firefighters at the FEMA workshop in Jersey City discussed the difficulty of battling a crude-oil fire, which can be explosive and hard to extinguish. One problem: limited supplies of the special foam required to smother the flames.

Jordan Zaretsky, a fire battalion chief in nearby Teaneck, N.J., who attended the presentation, said the scale of such an accident was sobering. ?This isn?t a structural fire that we can knock down in an hour or two,? he said. ?This is something we?d be dealing with for days.?

Ideas discussed at the workshop included devising a system to allow local officials to know when an oil train was passing through, developing public-service messages to tell residents what to do in case of a derailment and providing more firefighters with specialized training.

There have been many calls for changes to how crude oil is handled on the railroads, including new speed limits for trains and requirements to treat the crude oil to make it less volatile.

Earlier this month, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board urged the rail industry and federal regulators to move more swiftly to replace existing tank cars with ones that would better resist rupturing and fire.

A spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group for oil producers, said the companies are committed to ?greater efforts to prevent derailments through track maintenance and repair, upgrades to the tank car fleet, and giving first responders the knowledge and tools they need.?

The Association of American Railroads recognizes that ?more has to be done to further advance the safe movement of this product,? a spokesman said.

FEMA chose for the location of the derailment scenario a stretch of track adjacent to the New Jersey Turnpike and about a mile from downtown Jersey City. One side of the track is industrial and includes an electric substation. The other side is residential.

Edgardo Correa, a 59-year-old retired sanitation worker, lives in a house close to the tracks in Jersey City. He said he was aware that trains full of crude pass by his home. ?It?s an alarming thing,? he said.

?Joe Jackson contributed to this article.

Write to Russell Gold at russell.gold@wsj.com