It can be hard to feel connected to the oil industry in North Dakota if you’re, say, a school teacher living in downtown Seattle, or a waitress in rural Illinois. But the transportation of oil by rail is one of the clearest connections between the Bakken oil field and regular people around the country. Oil trains run along rivers, near playgrounds and next to homes from Oregon to Virginia. And when they derail and explode, the consequences are devastating. Now, the US Department of Transportation is trying to figure out how to make oil train cars safer. And as Inside Energy’s Emily Guerin reports, regulators in North Dakota may have a role to play.
Ron Schalow started paying attention to oil trains when one exploded in a small town in Quebec last summer and killed 47 people. He lives in Fargo, and while he personally doesn’t live near the railroad tracks, he goes near them all the time.
"My grandkids like to go to Spicy Pie. Their folks here go downtown here all the time. I don’t know how much time you’ve spent in downtown Fargo, but it’s all in the blast zone."
Schalow thinks the state of North Dakota could do more to make oil safer before it’s ever loaded onto a train. So, he started a petition. All those flammable liquids that naturally occur with Bakken oil, like butane and tk? He wants the Industrial Commission to make companies take them out.
"I don’t want them to put those explosive gases on the tanker cars at all."
The Industrial Commission might not pay attention to Schalow’s petition, but is paying close attention to the issue of exploding oil trains. Last month, the Department of Transportation released a draft of a proposed rule to make hauling oil by rail safer. They’re targeting Bakken crude in particular because there’s so much of it on the rails – and because they say it’s more volatile than other kinds of oil, something the oil industry disputes.
"I do not believe that Bakken oil is materially different from other like crude oils that are being produced particularly in this country today."
That’s Dennis Sutton. He’s a consultant hired by the North Dakota Petroleum Council to study whether Bakken oil really is more dangerous than other oils. He spoke at an Industrial Commission meeting on Wednesday. There, commission members said they are considering state-level regulations that would require companies to strip some of the flammable fluids out of oil – essentially what Schalow is asking for in his petition.
Lynn Helms is the director of the Department of Mineral Resources. He says it’s not clear yet what the state’s regulations might look like.
"This might be a recommended order, it might be a recommended emergency rule, we might come back with the conclusion that we can’t make any significant difference. But it seems to me, what I’m seeing in the data is that we can. We can make it as safe as possible."
One of the ways to do that is to heat the oil to separate some of the most flammable gasses and to lower the pressure of the oil before it’s put into a train car. But oil industry executives said they weren’t sure how
"There are things you can do at the well site but it will not make a material impact on the flammability in the crude car."
That’s Steve McNally. He’s the general manager for Hess in North Dakota.
"What it will do is add significant costs to each individual well. And as you add individual costs, it makes it more problematic for those wells to be economic."
Members of the Industrial Commission said they’re going to keep looking into what, if anything, they can do to make the oil safer. After all, North Dakota moves a lot of oil by rail – about ten 100-car trains a day – so the state has a vested interest in making sure that oil gets to market safely. What the commission decides affects people outside of North Dakota, too.
"Probably everybody knows somebody, somewhere in the country who either is living, or works, or plays, within what they call the blast zone."
And that, Ron Schalow points out, is a lot of people.
