With the recent December 30, 2013 derailment of tanker cars
carrying oil in Casselton, North Dakota, as well as other 2013 incidents
in western Minnesota, Baltimore, Alabama, and at three sites in Canada
(Gainfield, Landis, and Lac-Mégantic, where 47 people were killed when
an unattended 72-car freight train derailed in the center of town), the
U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) met with representatives from the oil
and railroad industries to discuss transport safety issues relating to crude
oil.
At the meeting on January 15, 2014, representatives from the
American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Association of American Railroads
(AAR) reportedly agreed to take steps to avoid derailments, to work on a speed
reduction plan, and to re-route trains around high-risk areas. According to the
AAR representative, 27 risk factors, including population density, volume of hazardous materials
being transported, and traffic density, are always considered when
routing trains. The API representative stressed the importance of having
strong rail cars to transport the crude oil.
On September 6, 2013, in the Federal Register, the Pipeline
and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) published a proposed rule concerning “Hazardous Materials: Rail Petitions and Recommendations to
Improve the Safety of Railroad Tank Car Transportation (RRR).This
proposed rule would impose additional requirements for DOT Specification
111 tank cars used to transport Packing Group (PG) I and II hazardous
materials. PHMSA has indicated that the proposed rule relating to
the construction of rail tanker cars will not be finalized until at least
January 2015.
With the volume of produced
oil rising faster than can be moved by pipeline, railroads are being used more
and more to transport oil products to processing facilities – and with that
increase, come increasing concerns about the safety of transporting
crude oil by rail.
In early January, PHMSA and the Federal Railroad
Administration issued a safety alert “to notify
the general public, emergency responders, and shippers and carriers that recent
derailments and resulting fires indicate that the type of crude oil being
transported from the Bakken region may be more flammable than traditional heavy
crude oil.” For additional information, see our prior blog
entitled “Safety alert relating to flammability of North Dakota Bakken crude oil transported by rail.”
This post was written by Barclay Nicholson (barclay.nicholson@nortonrosefulbright.com or 713.651.3662) from Norton Rose Fulbright's Energy Practice Group.
