I have been a bit surprised at how little news coverage there is of the horrific oil train accident in Canada.
is it becasue the safe alternative is a pipeline Obama could have allowed to be built 5 years ago is safer.. but it still not approved?
on another note..
Buffet couldn't have created a better scenario for his once failing rail and tank car manufacturing companies...
it is a tragedy that such a large disaster is all but ignored by the media..
is it becasue the safe alternative is a pipeline Obama could have allowed to be built 5 years ago is safer.. but it still not approved?
The Canadian prime minister’s assertion in May that transporting oil to the United States by rail is environmentally challenging seems to be a bit of an understatement after an entire Canadian city was obliterated by a train derailment of crude oil from the Bakken shale oil fields. Obama and his minions have done everything in their power to block oil pipelines. Therefore, record amounts of crude oil are being transported by rail car.
The Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Corp. said Sunday air brakes may be to blame for the derailment, which set off fires and explosions that destroyed much of the center of Lac-Megantic, less than 20 miles from the Maine border.
The unmanned train, carrying thousands of barrels of oil, began rolling toward town in the early hours of Saturday for reasons still under investigation. It went off the tracks and exploded.
The train was parked at the Nantes station, and its locomotive at the station was shut down after the engineer departed for the night. That may have resulted in the release of air brakes on the locomotive holding the train in place, the company said.
Investigators are also looking whether an onboard fire shortly before the train arrived at the station may have played a role.
Before the accident, the MMA railway had been “regarded as a turnaround story,” finding renewed success in transporting crude by rail,
The railway is a key link from oil from the Bakken formation and Canadian oil sands to Irving Oil’s refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick, the newspaper said.
Shipments of crude by rail have increased sharply in recent years, and have become enmeshed with the controversy surrounding oil pipelines and environmental concerns about the oil boom.
Analysts at Scotiabank said in a note Monday oil shipments in Canada have almost tripled over the past two years to more than 14,000 car loadings so far this year.
“This has been one of the ways in which markets have attempted to circumvent a shortage of North American pipeline infrastructure,” the bank said.
Nearly 234,000 carloads of crude were shipped in 2012, up from 9,500 carloads in 2008
The BNSF railroad, part of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway empire, is one of the biggest crude-carriers.
“Our railroad is now transporting about 500,000 barrels of oil daily, roughly 10% of the total produced in the ‘lower 48′,
on another note..
By early 2015, thousands of newly minted, gleaming crude tank cars will leave the sheds of manufacturers such as Trinity Industries Inc., Union Tank Car Co. and Greenbrier Co. to carry rising North American crude production, offering some relief to the choked North American oil pipelines.
On any given week, three to seven CP Rail trains laden with crude oil from the North Dakota Bakken field whisk across North America, bypassing the pipeline bottlenecks in mid-continent that are depressing oil prices and unaffected by the noise in Washington, D.C., that is holding back the Keystone XL pipeline.
It’s a roaring business. In 2009, when Calgary-based Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. started dabbling in crude oil transportation, it moved 500 of its black barrel-shaped cars out of the basin. Last year, its oil trains carried 13,000 cars and soon CP could be moving 70,000 cars or more a year out of the North Dakota Bakken tight-oil field alone.
“The tank car backlog is close to 48,000, and perhaps as many as 30,000 are related to crude petroleum,” said Toby Kolstad, who runs advisory firm Rail Theory Forecasts.
The number of tank cars ordered for shipping crude and expected to be delivered by the end of 2014 will be enough to move two million barrels of oil per day, almost three times what is currently extracted from the Bakken shale basin, Mr. Kolstad said.
That’s the size of two Keystone XLs and one Seaway pipeline.
As much as 40% of the orders are from Canadian entities desperate to get their crude out of Western Canada and into U.S. refineries in the East and on the Gulf Coast.
This is a dramatic turnaround for train manufacturers that never thought they would see another growth spurt in their industry.
Mr. Buffett has a controlling stake in Union Tank Car, and has emerged as a major beneficiary of the crude-via-rail boom as the owner of BNSF Railway Co
Pipeline companies’ inability to push through regulations and opposition to shipping Alberta bitumen to refineries across North America has allowed railway companies, tank-car makers, barge operators and a whole host of other transportation sectors to build a tidy revenue stream based on crude.
Buffet couldn't have created a better scenario for his once failing rail and tank car manufacturing companies...
it is a tragedy that such a large disaster is all but ignored by the media..