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News Not to Miss: Oil Train Spill, China Petrochemical Deal, Methane Leaks

June 30, 2018

News Not to Miss: Oil Train Spill, China Petrochemical Deal, Methane Leaks

It’s hard to keep up with the flood of news these days. Here’s your weekly round-up of news not to miss from DeSmog.

Justin Mikulka has been on the oil train beat for years. He’s documented how the oil boom and pipeline bottleneck in the Bakken Shale has led to more, longer, and heavier trains shuttling oil across North America and how various factors also have led to another type of boom: the literal “boom” of exploding oil trains. (In fact, train operators have given them the nickname “bomb trains.”)

This week, Mikulka writes about the latest oil train incident, this time involving a BNSF train carrying tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, across northwestern Iowa.

While it fortunately resulted in no fire or explosion, the June 22 derailment did release an estimated 230,000 gallons of oil into a flooded Iowa river.

Of particular note is the fact that the Iowa oil train crash is the first one involving the new, safer DOT-117R rail tank cars, which were supposed to improve the safety of oil trains.

China and West Virginia: A Fracking-to-Plastics Dream in Appalachia

The shale oil and gas industry, fueled by fracking, is helping pump record volumes of production in the U.S. But with all those fossil fuels flooding the market, they have to go somewhere.

That’s why the state of West Virginia is spearheading an effort to build out a massive petrochemical storage and production hub in the Ohio River Valley. In fact, last November the state signed an $83 billion deal with Chinese investors to make this fracking-to-plastics dream a reality. (For context, West Virginia’s total gross domestic product was only $76.8 billion last year.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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