New Oil-By-Rail Regulations Are Big Win for Oil and Rail Industries, Won’t Stop “Bomb Trains”
The long-awaited oil-by-rail regulations released today are basically a guidebook for the oil and rail industries to continue doing business as usual when it comes to moving explosive Bakken crude oil by rail.
DeSmog recently reported on how the Obama administration has worked behind the scenes to help achieve the oil industry’s top goal when it came to these new regulations — allowing the oil producers to continue to put the highly volatile Bakken crude oil into rail tank cars without removing the natural gas liquids that make it such an explosive mixture.
As we’ve reported, there is a relatively simple fix to end, or significantly reduce, the “bomb train” disasters, via a process known as stabilization.
But the new regulations not only give the industry a pass on doing this, they add to the “we need more research before we do anything” approach that is the preferred tactic the industry and regulators are using to delay addressing the issue.
On page 232 of the new regulations, they state the following:
Any specific regulatory changes related to treatment of crude oil would consider further research and be handled in a separate action.
If you are a Bakken oil producer, that one sentence out of the close to 400 pages of new regulations is all you need to know. Time to start writing thank you notes to your lobbyists.
As Al Jazeera recently reported, quoting a professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Houston who was commenting on the science of Bakken crude:
“The notion that this requires significant research and development is a bunch of BS.”
A similar sentiment was expressed in an editorial published by RailwayAge earlier this week responding to the Department of Energy announcement that it will study the issue of Bakken oil volatility
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