Until now, government authorities have only required limited testing of recycled irrigation water, checking for naturally occurring toxins such as salts and arsenic, using decades-old monitoring standards. They haven’t screened for the range of chemicals used in modern oil production.
The Obama administration on Friday issued new rules intended to make oil-by-rail safer. But environmental groups rejected the reforms, saying a methodical program to remove aging train cars from service all but guarantees further catastrophic accidents.
The Department of Transportation’s new rules would phase out the DOT-111 rail cars, still in use since the 1960s, by 2018. Newer CPC-1232 cars, which still aren’t perfect, would have to be replaced by 2020 with a new-and-improved DOT-117 model.
According to The New York Times:
All cars built under the DOT-117 standard after Oct. 1, 2015, will have a thicker nine-sixteenths-inch tank shell, a one-half-inch shield running the full height of the front and back of a tank car, thermal protection and improved pressure-relief valves and bottom outlet valves.
Last month DOT issued new standards designed to reduce speeds traveled by oil trains in residential areas.
A coalition of activist groups, including the Sierra Club and the NRDC, said Friday’s announcement didn’t go nearly far enough. Earthjustice released a statement saying:
The groups continue to call for an immediate ban on these cars, citing the federal agencies’ own projections that 15 derailments on mainlines are likely every year. DOT’s phase-out period allows the crude oil fleet to more than double before these tank cars are taken out of service, knowingly exposing communities daily to unacceptable risks.
As NRDC notes, the increase in U.S. oil production — mostly in shale-rock formations in Texas and North Dakota — has caused the oil industry to step up transport of its product by rail. In 2009, U.S. crude “filled a mere 8,000 rail tanker cars,” NRDC notes. In 2013, it filled 400,000.
A series of fiery accidents have spurred calls for increased safety: In July 2013, an oil train went out of control, crashed and exploded in the Quebec city of Lac-Megantic, killing 47 people. Earlier this year oil trains derailed in West Virginia, Illinois and Ontario.
It’s no coincidence that, when a train full of less volatile ethanol fuel derailed in North Dakota in February, the damage was much less severe.
The accidents have put the spotlight on how U.S. and Canadian-produced oil is transported around North America. Environmentalists also are strongly opposed to extending the Keystone XL pipeline through the U.S. to the Gulf of Mexico, and so far that project has been shelved as the State Department considers whether to approve it. President Obama has indicated his disapproval. But the debate hasn’t made Americans much more informed about it. The University of Texas at Austin conducted a poll and found that only 42 percent of adults were even aware of the project.
What do you think is the safest, most efficient way to move oil around?
Ending months of delays and uncertainty, federal regulators on Friday disclosed new rules for safer transportation of crude oil by trains, introducing a new tank car standard and mandating the use of new braking technology.
California is the nation’s air pollution paradox. We have the country’s dirtiest air, especially in the Central Valley and the Los Angeles basin. But we are also a national leader in efforts to improve air quality. And we’ve made more progress on that front than most other parts of the country.
The headline of an article in the Washington Post on Tuesday might have gotten a lot of people excited about the fact that air travel may be more environmentally friendly than driving. Unfortunately, the analysis out of the University of Michigan featured in Tuesday’s article leads to some false conclusions, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT).
The state of Florida is urging the federal government to postpone planned permitting of seismic exploration for oil and gas in the Atlantic Ocean, saying there is not enough information about the impact on endangered whales, sea turtles and fish.
As Pope Francis prepares to deliver what is likely to be a highly influential encyclical this summer on environmental degradation and the effects of human-caused climate change on the poor, he is alarming some conservatives in the United States who are loath to see the Catholic Church reposition itself as a mighty voice in a cause they do not believe in.
The moderate global warming that has already occurred as a result of human emissions has quadrupled the frequency of certain heat extremes since the Industrial Revolution, scientists reported Monday.
All across North America, patches of land are being taken over by the rigs, roads, and storage facilities of thousands of oil and gas drilling operations. Now, for the first time, a study tallies up the land area they consume: 30,000 square kilometers—an area equivalent to three Yellowstone National Parks.
The expansion of oil-sands mines and drilling pads has brought the caribou pictured on Canada’s 25-cent coin to the brink of extinction in Alberta and British Columbia. To arrest the population decline, the two provinces are intensifying a hunt of the caribou’s main predator, the gray wolf. Conservation groups accuse the provinces of making wolves into scapegoats for man-made damage to caribou habitats.
