The agency recommended thicker shells and other modifications to strengthen the cars. The NTSB estimates that 69 percent of today’s rail tank-car fleet has “a high incidence of tank failure during accidents,” Chairman Deborah Hersman wrote in letter last year. For years, regulators and watchdogs have sought improvements to a common car design shown to be susceptible to rupture when derailed. The Quebec accident also revived a debate over the type of cars used to haul oil. Investigating whether the chemical composition of Bakken oil makes it more likely to corrode tank cars is reasonable, said Peter Goelz, a former National Transportation Safety Board managing director who’s now a senior vice president with O’Neill and Associates in Washington. Because information provided to railroads on the properties of oil is not gathered from tests, the agency said it “can only speculate” as to the number of cars in violation of hazardous-materials regulations. Shippers need to know the properties of the oil to ensure that it’s transported in tankers equipped to handle the cargo, according to the rail agency’s letter.
“If the hydrochloric acid is carried with the oil into rail cars, corrosion can be an issue,” Andy Lipow, president of Houston-based Lipow Oil Associates, said in an email. A possible cause is contamination of crude by materials used in fracking, according to the letter. In a July 29 letter to the American Petroleum Institute, a Washington-based lobbying and standards-setting group for the oil and gas industry, the railway administration said it found increasing cases of damage to tanker cars’ interior surfaces. A question they say they’re asking is why the derailment led to such an intense inferno, which regulators have called “abnormal.” They visited North Dakota as part of their review, said Chris Krepski, a spokesman for the Transportation Safety Board of Canada. Railroads move 75 percent of the state’s crude, including the load of more than 70 cars that derailed and exploded last month in Lac-Megantic, Quebec.Ĭanadian regulators are testing the composition of crude from the wrecked Montreal Maine and Atlantic Railway Ltd. North Dakota is the nation’s second-biggest oil-producing state, with more than 790,000 barrels a day this year up from from about 150,000 barrels in 2008. Crude oil futures have traded higher than $100 a barrel since July, and are more than $90 a barrel since late April. “At $75 per barrel, it could be a big deal,” he said. Such costs are less likely to slow production when is oil trading for $100 or more per barrel, Book said. “The solution to rail safety issues looks like unanticipated costs, whether, it be rail car investments or new safety protocols,” Book said in an email. The cost of added safety measures, such as tighter rail-car specifications that would make obsolete some current models, may become an issue if oil prices fall, according to Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based policy-analysis firm. Perhaps Bakken crude should be considered in a higher category.” “The risks have been considered to be environmental, not to humans. “Crude historically has not been considered in the highest category of hazmat,” said Anthony Hatch, an independent analyst in New York who has tracked railroad companies for almost three decades.
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