Derail and Catch Fire

The derailment yesterday of a North Dakota oil train in Mt. Carbon, WV, made national news:

The tank cars exploded and fell into a river, causing a water treatment plant to shut intake valves. They were still burning 21 hours later. Thousands of people may have their water turned off. Charleston is downstream of the spill

What didn't make national news was a derailment in Ontario of a train carrying crude oil from the tar sands of Keystone XL fame:

The train, heading from Alberta to eastern Canada, derailed shortly before midnight about 80 km (50 miles) south of Timmins, Ontario, a CN spokesman said. Canada's largest rail operator said 29 of 100 cars were involved and seven were on fire.

Another oil train fire killed 47 people in Quebec in 2013, and several other trains have exploded in North Dakota and on the east coast.

The cars carrying the crude oil in West Virginia were the new, supposedly safer, tank cars that the railroads didn't want to use because they cost too much. Turns out they aren't much better than the flimsier ones they want to continue using.

Oil prices are really low now because of the glut of oil coming from Canada and North Dakota. Now is the time to take a step back and reevaluate everything about the way we're getting oil out of the ground. And it's not just train accidents.

Oklahoma used to have two or three earthquakes a year. Now they're having two or three a day. It's due to injecting massive quantities of fracking fluid into fault lines, which lubricates them and allows them to slip. But oilmen insist that it's not their fault:

But Kim Hatfield of the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association says he's not convinced there's a connection. He says oil companies have been pumping brine down wastewater injection wells for decades. More than 3,200 of the wells dot the state.

They've been pumping this crap into the earth for decades and they don't think it has something to with the 100-fold increase in earthquakes. Right...

Clearly we need to continue to drill for oil for the foreseeable future. But we don't need to drill so manically fast that we kill innocent people who live along railroads and pipelines, and destroy the houses and property values of people who live near injection wells.

The oil coming out of the tar sands and the Bakken formation is much more flammable than other types, according to that liberal rag, the Wall Street Journal. The sulfurous chemistry of Canadian tar sands oil may also make it more likely to eat through pipelines, which is one reason many land owners along its route are skeptical.

Cleaning up oil spills, compensating land owners, shutting down water treatment plants, repairing damaged track inflict significant economic costs on people who aren't profiting from the sale of this highly flammable oil. It's the tragedy of the commons all over again.

It's obvious that pipelines should be used to transport this oil, but they have to be up to the task. The right technical solution isn't clear yet: putting highly corrosive and flammable crude into a pipeline may never be feasible. It could be that the right solution is to filter out the problematic components of the crude first. (And then where do you dump that?)

In the long run what will stop an oil company from ignoring that requirement in 10 years, once all the shouting is over, and start pumping explosive acidic oil across America? How do you make pipeline owners strapped for cash because of low oil prices keep their lines properly maintained?

When these companies violate these agreements and everything explodes in their employees' faces the execs just have that subsidiary declare bankruptcy and then go off and form another subsidiary to do it all over again.