PES: Bombtrain Terminal

For anyone who lives in Center City or along the Lower Schuylkill, this image bears little shock value. Most of us don’t go a day without seeing at least one line of tank cars loafing on the tracks beside the Schuylkill River Trail. I actually came upon this unit train on my trip to take photos of the North Yard. Not a total surprise, but just goes to show how easy these are to find. 

But why?

If you read my overview of Sunoco’s decline between 2010 and 2012 (see Section IV), you will recall that Sunoco’s purchase of West African crude oil - an expensive petroleum that required transatlantic shipment - made the company quite uncompetitive in 2008-2012 high-crude-low-gasoline price environment. (Recap: other refiners were buying cheaper petroleum and were less impacted by the low price of gasoline.) 

After Sunoco tanked in 2012, the Carlyle Group took over and made two major changes to the refinery: 

(i) the refinery became Philadelphia Energy Solutions, and 

(ii) the refinery stopped importing its oil from West Africa and started importing it from, among other places, an area commonly referred to as ‘the Bakken.’ 

Bakken background: the Bakken Formation -- or ‘the Bakken,’ for short -- is one of the largest oil reserves in North America. Despite its capacious oil reservoirs, the Bakken was off-limits to the oil industry for decades after its discovery in the mid 20th century. It’s petroleum is so hard to access that recovery was economically inviable. Upon the advent of large-scale, lower-cost hydraulic fracturing operations, however, by which subterranean rock formations are fractured to release underlying petroleum and natural gas, the Bakken experienced what what the industry calls a ‘boom.’ 

The boom technically started in 2000, but, between 2009 and 2014, things really started to pick up. Production jumped from 100,000 barrels-a-day in 2006, to 500,000 barrels-a-day in 2011, to 1.2 million barrels-a-day by December 2014.

To the delight of refiners, Bakken crude wasn’t just abundant, it was cheap and easy to refine. In March 2012, just before the Carlyle Group swooped in, Bakken crude sold for $30 a barrel -- $90 less than the price Sunoco was paying for West African crude. And, being a light sweet crude, Bakken’s composition made it perfect for old refineries like PES.

All sounds great right? Well, no, not at all. 

In addition to providing the fossil fuel industry with another massive reserve of oil and gas to completely exhaust and burn, the Bakken gave rise to one of the largest transportation crises in recent history. Without enough pipeline to transport Bakken crude to the many refiners demanding it, Enron Oil & Gas, one of the first major companies to begin exploiting the Bakken oil deposit, had the bright idea to start shipping oil around the country on massive unit trains, each carrying between 80 to 100 tank cars of crude.

Here is a collection of statements that express why, in my opinion, that created a very bad and very dangerous situation for the United States and Canada:

• By 2008, not a single barrel of oil had been shipped out of the Bakken by rail, and no type of oil had ever been shipped anywhere on 100-car unit trains. 
• Between 2008 and 2015, neither Transport Canada nor the U.S. Department of Transportation differentiated between the danger of moving a single car filled with crude oil, and moving a train carrying 100 cars of oil, according to interviews with ranking members of both agencies. Since 2015, the official designation for U.S. trains carrying 20 or more tank cars of flammable liquids is ‘High-Hazard Flammable Train.’ A similar policy may have arisen in Canada, but I am unsure. 
• Between 2009 and 2013, rail shipment of crude oil increased by 4,000%, according to a statement delivered to the U.S. House of Representatives by acting administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration Sarah Feinberg. In the same statement, Feinberg labelled the situation “a nationwide transportation safety concern.”
• By 2014, the combined shipment of crude oil and ethanol reached 2,466-car-loads per day.
• During these years, the DOT-111 tank car was widely used to ship Bakken crude. (In fact, 69% of all tank cars in use in the United States by 2011 were DOT-111s.) With a capacity of 25,498 gallons, each DOT-111 can carry over 607 barrels of oil. If each unit train carried between 80 and 100 tank cars, and 2,466 car-loads of oil were shipped every day in 2014, we deduce two facts: 
• (i) Anywhere between 25 and 30 unit trains were travelling through the U.S. every day in 2014. 
• (ii) Each one of these unit trains carried between 48,560 and 60,700 barrels (or 2,039,520 and 2,549,400 gallons) of oil.
• By 2015, both the Canadian and U.S. governments had banned DOT-111s from transporting Bakken crude oil, citing, among other imperfections: their susceptibility to rupturing in the event of a derailment, as well as their lack of thermal protection and consequent susceptibility to melting or exploding during a fire.
• The Federal Railroad Administration, a department within the U.S. Department of Transportation, regulates and assesses the safety of rail shipments based on the reports of its safety inspectors, a certain number of whom are employed in each of the US’ eight railroad regions. For FY2019, the FRA planned to have 63 hazardous-materials safety inspectors oversee rail shipments for the entire continential U.S. The table below shows the regional breakdown of this number, and the figure that follows depicts the territory of each region. 
• Sneak preview: Pennsylvania is in Region 2, where there are 8 people responsible for overseeing all the hazardous-material shipments travelling through, in addition to PA, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, and Washington DC. My personal favorite is Region 8, which somehow includes Alaska.  

• In 2013, the U.S. Government Accountability Office submitted a report to Congress stating that the FRA’s inspectors “have the ability to annually inspect less than 1 percent of the railroad activities covered in regulation.”
• In 2013, just before crude-shipment by rail reached one of its all-time highs, the annual report of the American Society for Civil Engineers awarded U.S. infrastructure a D+.  
• On July 14, 2013 a 72-car unit train carrying Bakken shale oil derailed at 64-mph in Lac-Megantic, Ontario, causing a massive explosion and fire that took the lives of 47 people. At the time of the disaster, the unprecedented surge in crude-by-rail transport had reduced the number of safety inspectors designated to oversee the industry to one for every 4,000 tank cars.  

• In January 2014, the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety 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.”
• Between the Lac Megantic derailment in July 2013 and April 2015, there were 22 train accidents in the United States involving trains carrying crude oil.
• Amid the debate concerning the safety of using DOT-111s to ship the highly volatile, highly explosive Bakken crude -- centering on whether or not Bakken should be classified as a more-flammable substance and thus be shipped in a different tank car -- Fritz Wybenga of Dangerous Goods Transport Consulting made the point that, at high speeds: “You can’t design-out a tank car [from] rupturing.”

Although much has changed since 2014/2015, when PES was the largest single buyer of Bakken crude and received six miles of unit train every day, nothing has changed about the fundamental risk of sending 3 million barrels of a highly-explosive substance through a densely populated city like Philadelphia. I mean, I took that video during a visit to Bartram’s Garden -- not where one expects to encounter tank cars. (Full disclosure, I think those tanks were filled with liquified natural gas.)

Two more points before wrapping up this exhibit. 

In a 2015 report entitled “Environmental Justice and Oil Trains in Pennsylvania,” PennEnvironment examined the demographic contents of Philadelphia’s ‘blast zone’ -- the one-mile evacuation area that the U.S. Department of Transportation recommends in the event of an oil-train explosion. Even more shocking than the fact that, according to the report, 937,885 people live within the one-mile blast zone is the fact that 50% of Philadelphia’s most vulnerable demographic live in that area, and 38% of Philadelphia's minority population live there as well.

The second point is this: In the aftermath of the Lac Megantic disaster, The Globe and Mail interviewed a man named Steve Vachon, a lifelong resident of Lac Megantic. Reflecting on the way he and his community members had come to experience the constant oil-train traffic, he confessed: “You see the oil come through – you see it all the time, there's a lot of it – and you just kind of convince yourself that it's safe." 

The frequency of our exposure to the threats of living with oil does not attenuate their destructive potential. Hundreds of trains passed through Lac Meganic before the town became a synonym for the worst train disaster in recent memory. Until rail operators stop sending bomb trains through American and Canadian communities, it is on us to remember how dangerous the oil industry is making our everyday lives -- and honestly how backwards it is that we so willingly fill our cars, homes, and neighborhoods with a substance federally required to be labeled as: