The only solution for (railroad) safety (of Bakken Crude) is stabilization, which evaporates and re-liquefies nearly all of the petroleum gases for separate delivery to refiners. Stabilization is voluntarily and uniformly practiced in the Eagle Fork formation in Texas, whose untreated crude is even more volatile than that fracked from the Bakken Formation straddling Montana, North Dakota, and Canada’s Saskatchewan Province. So far, stabilized Eagle Fork crude has been transported by tank car as far away as Quebec City, WITHOUT the fireballs that have plagued the shipment of unstabilized Baaken crude since the first, shocking explosion at Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in July 2013. Instead, most of the explosive gases remain dissolved in the unstabilized Bakken oil for extraction after delivery to distant refineries. Pending development of a North Dakota petrochemical industry, the extracted gases may have to be FLARED into the atmosphere —already a problem in the state. Alternatively, they could be shipped, as liquefied petroleum gases routinely are now, in tank cars designed for explosive materials. The oil industry says this will increase the net danger from petrochemical trains, so perhaps flaring must be accepted as the safe choice for as long as it takes to collect and process the butane and propane regionally. (North Dakotas) three-person Industrial Commission seems likely to adopt a set of industry-designed best practices....North Dakotan crude will have to be lightly pressure-cooked to boil off a FRACTION of the volatile “light ends” before shipment. This conditioning lowers the ignition temperature of crude oil—but not by much. It leaves in solution most of the culprit gases, including butane and propane. Even the industry itself says conditioning would not make Bakken crude meaningfully safer.... If PHMSA had prescribed stabilization as a national rule at the start of the shale oil boom, the shipping of Bakken crude by rail would have been just as safe as that of comparable Texas crude.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 03:56:11 +0000
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