{"id":6032,"date":"2023-02-19T07:17:57","date_gmt":"2023-02-19T13:17:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=6032"},"modified":"2023-02-19T07:18:06","modified_gmt":"2023-02-19T13:18:06","slug":"four-rail-borne-risks-moving-through-american-communities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=6032","title":{"rendered":"Four rail-borne risks moving through American communities<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Communities alongside rail lines had two more close calls this week as freight trains carrying hazardous materials derailed in Houston and Detroit.
\nFor the communities where this week\u2019s wrecks took place, the damage was less severe than symbolic: a reminder of the importance of rail-borne hazardous materials to every part of the economy just after the crash in East Palestine, Ohio.
\nHouston is the capital of the nation\u2019s petroleum industry, part of a sprawling crescent of refineries, crackers, factories and liquefaction plants stretching from Baytown, Texas, to the Mississippi River industrial corridor in Louisiana \u2014 sometimes called Cancer Alley.
\nAnd Detroit \u2014 the once-and-future heartland of American automotive manufacturing \u2014 is now a rising hub of electric vehicle and battery manufacturing, a suite of high technologies whose exotic chemistries depend on hazardous materials.
\nFor example, liquid chlorine \u2014 carried in the train that derailed in Detroit \u2014 is an essential component in wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicle batteries, according to the Chlorine Institute.
\nThe crashes in both regions \u2014 one a rising hub of clean energy, the other of fossil fuels \u2014 underscored the risk posed by hazardous materials moving through the nation\u2019s towns and cities.
\nThat is a risk that is often invisible until, suddenly, it explodes.
\nSince 2015, the U.S. rail system has been responsible for 106 derailments in which hazardous materials were released, according to Federal Railway Administration data analyzed by The Hill.
\nIn 2022 alone, the agency tracked ten derailments containing hazardous materials, which ranged from a pair of propane-carrying cars overturned in Maine to a 44-car derailment in Iowa that sent 65,000 gallons of asphalt into an Iowa creek.
\nLast year also saw a spill of 19,300 gallons of hydrochloric acid from a derailment in Oklahoma and 20,000 gallons of nervous system-distorting methyl methacrylate monomer \u2014 a key ingredient in fake nails.
\nIn East Palestine, approximately 36 cars derailed \u2014 11 of which carried hazardous materials.
\nIf that wreck had happened in 2022, it would have been in 8th place in terms of cars destroyed.
\nStill, these trains \u2014 especially in emergency situations \u2014 pose unseen risks.
\n\u201cLocal communities don\u2019t know what\u2019s in these trains,\u201d said Kristen Boyle, an attorney with public interest law firm Earthjustice. \u201cLocal communities can\u2019t find out. They can\u2019t stop the trains from going through, and they have been unable to get safety regulations.\u201d
\n\u201cAnd then they\u2019re the ones left with, you know, the explosion,\u201d she added.
\nRepresentatives from the Department of Transportation told The Hill that the agency doesn\u2019t monitor the real-time movement of hazardous materials across the country. Trains carried about a million tons per day by rail in 2017, the last year the government released numbers.
\nThe nation\u2019s rail trade groups have been quick to point out that this system is very safe on a train-by-train basis. According to the Associated of American Railroads (AAR), trains are ten times as safe per mile as trucks,\u2002and 99.9 percent of hazmat-containing rail shipments make it to their destination without incident.
\nBut trains also carry far more cargo than trucks \u2014 making the risks of a spill far more severe. And the sheer volume of U.S. rail travel means that even a failure rate of 0.1 percent can lead to a lot of damage.
\nFor example, about 20,000 rail shipments of vinyl chloride \u2014 the highly explosive and carcinogenic chemical that Norfolk Southern contractors poured in a ditch and burned off in East Palestine \u2014 cross the country each year, according to the American Chemical Society.
\nThat 99.5 percent success rate would still allow for 100 possible releases of a hazardous chemical \u2014 such as crude oil, ethanol, vinyl chloride or methane.
\nCRUDE OIL
\nOne recent boom in hazardous material transport by rail dates back to the coincidence of two historic phenomena in the 2010s that drove a boom in crude oil transports by rail.
\nThe first was the boom in \u201cfracked\u201d oil and gas, and second, the discovery of shale plays far from traditional pipeline complexes.
\nThese two developments created a radical shift in the geography of the U.S. oil industry \u2014 one that created a need for new routes to connect new wells to new or existing coastal export terminals.
\nAnd when the proposed export pipelines projects \u2014 such as Keystone XL, the Dakota Access Pipeline and Atlantic Coast Pipeline \u2014 foundered against dedicated local opposition in rural farm counties, the booming oil and gas industry turned to rail.
\nIn March of 2010, just 1.2 million barrels of oil were moved by train \u2014 a quantity that peaked at 35 million in October of 2014, mostly out of the new fracking fields in the Midwest, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA).
\nThe rail transport boom didn\u2019t last \u2014 in part because investors slammed the brakes on an oil industry that it saw as irresponsibly overproducing.
\nBut even as transport volumes fell, by November 2022 they still remained six times higher than where they had been in 2021. That month, 7.27 million barrels crossed the U.S. by train.
\nThat number still represented about 90,000 carloads of crude oil per day \u2014 each hauling about 13,500 gallons, according to AAR.
\nAnd if a proposed merger between Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern is approved, it will create direct routes for exporting Canadian tar sands through the United States, Houston Public Media found.
\nThat would be the same product that exploded in 2013 in the small Quebec town of Lac Megantic, killing 47.
\nEnvironmental and civil society groups are calling on the Biden administration to restore oil train safety rules weakened by Trump, as The Hill previously reported.
\nETHANOL
\nIn December, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed new rules intended to spur the production of enough biofuels and e-fuels, such as ethanol, to replace up to 180,000 barrels of oil per year.
\nAbout 95 percent of the ethanol moved in the U.S. in the first half of 2022 moved by rail \u2014 and rail exports of both ethanol and biofuels are rising, according EIA.
\nBiodiesel shipments by rail have also increased fivefold since 2010.
\nRail biodiesel shipments were just 2.6 million barrels per year \u2014 but had soared to 13 million by 2019. Ethanol, meanwhile, has increased from 208 million barrels per year in 2010 to 237 million in 2022.
\nAs with everything else, a higher volume of transport means a higher volume of spills.
\nIn 2017, an ethanol train derailed and caught fire in northwestern Iowa after a bridge collapsed beneath it. In 2019 authorities in Utah blew up 11 biodiesel and propane cars derailed in a Union Pacific wreck.
\nVINYL CHLORIDE
\nThe train that crashed in East Palestine carried vinyl chloride, a key ingredient used to make plastic. It is the kind of petroleum-based chemical that the fossil fuel industry is betting on in a greening world, CNBC reported.
\nPlastic use is projected to double in wealthy countries by 2060 \u2014 and most of those plastics will be \u201cprimary\u201d plastics, or single-use, non-recycled ones, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
\nThe continued dominance of single-use plastics means increased risk from toxic chemicals at both ends of the supply chain. Under this production scenario, the OECD found that plastic waste discharged into the environment would triple, with unknown consequences to public health and the environment.
\nBut it also means a boom in the production and transport of plastic precursors \u2014 the volatile ingredients used to make them \u2014 will also have to increase.
\nFor example, according to one industry report, vinyl chloride production is expected to grow 6 percent annually over the next five years.
\nThat puts local communities on the hook for safety decisions made in the faraway boardrooms of the Class I Freight railroads. In the case of East Palestine, those decisions represented a twofold mistake by Norfolk Southern, environmental attorney Frank Petosa told the Hill.
\nFirst, Petosa pointed to the railroad\u2019s \u201cfailure\u201d to maintain the train\u2019s wheels \u2014 causing the derailment and the subsequent fire.
\nBut that mistake was compounded by a more serious one: the lack of proper safety release valves in the cars carrying vinyl chloride so that pressure could not be let out to avoid an explosion once the train \u2014 which was not considered highly flammable \u2014 caught fire.
\nThen the railroad capped this off with a final error, Petosa said. With no way to safely relieve pressure as the cars burned, Petosa noted, \u201cthey chose a solution that made everything worse. They chose to just, you know, poke holes in the tanks, release them into a burn pit and create an environmental disaster.\u201d
\nMETHANE
\nThe expansion of plastics production goes alongside another boom in fossil fuels \u2014 the increase in the transport of methane, the explosive chemical commonly known as natural gas.
\nSince the Obama administration, the fossil fuel industry has characterized the nation\u2019s gas industry as an energy weapon against Russia. The industry is in the midst of a historic buildout.
\nThe main driver in this growth is a flood of new terminals \u2014 many of which will be serviced by rail. The Federal Energy and Regulatory Commission has approved 16 new LNG export terminals.
\nThe LNG industry will help drive an estimated increase in U.S. consumption of petroleum will grow for the next 25 years \u2014 a growth that can be primarily accounted for by the rise in LNG exports, according to the EIA.
\nBy 2050, the agency predicted that the U.S. would be producing 25 percent more gas than it consumed \u2014 most of it coming from new shale gas developments in corners of the United States, like the Bakken Shale of North Dakota.
\nMany of the new wave of natural gas terminals \u2014 built on the Gulf Coast, where shelter-in-place orders from chemical spills are a regular occurrence \u2014 will not need rail connections.
\nThat is because they are connected to oil and gas wells by dense pipeline networks laid over the past century of oil and chemical production.
\nBut others will be in areas where fossil fuels are a relative novelty \u2014 and where the only way to get volatile gasses in and out is by truck or trail.
\nFor example, New Fortress Energy\u2019s Miami LNG plant could process about 740,00 gallons of LNG per day \u2014 which would be supplied\u2002by trucks and trains moving through a densely populated city, a report from Food and Water Watch found.
\nThen there is the proposed LNG export terminal in Gibbstown, New Jersey \u2014 which a dozen New Jersey and Pennsylvania towns are fighting largely because of the fear that LNG-bearing cars would become \u201cbomb trains\u201d in a derailment.
\nLNG is so energy-dense that a single train carrying 22 cars of the substance contains approximately the same explosive energy as the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, according to a 2020 comment by Earthjustice.
\nIn a worst-case scenario \u2014 in which LNG spreading unchecked in a pool rapidly turns to explosive vapor, triggering a fireball \u2014 flames would put people and structures at risk\u2002as far as 1.5 miles from the leak, according to a report by the National Academy of Sciences.
\nThe NAS also found that bystanders as far as .4 miles from the spreading pool of flaming LNG \u2014 or a quarter mile from that fireball \u2014 could get s and bystanders could get second-degree burns at nearly half a mile away, according to a report by the National Academy of Sciences.
\nLike the oil train brakes mentioned above, the LNG-by-rail issue is another regulatory whipsaw between the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations.
\nIn 2020, the Trump Administration permitted the shipment of refrigerated methane \u2014 also known as liquefied natural gas, or LNG \u2014 via rail without special safety precautions.
\nThe administration made this decision over the protests of both its own National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
\nThe NTSB found that LNG shipments would likely start slowly and ramp up over time. But \u201cthe risks of catastrophic LNG releases in accidents is too great not to have operational controls in place before large blocks of tank cars and unit trains proliferate,\u201d the agency found.
\nUnder a policy called \u201cenergy dominance,\u201d the Trump administration approved LNG-by-rail anyway, without the restriction that the NTSB had requested.
\nIn November 2021, PHMSA suspended the Trump rule, but it has yet to promulgate a new rule or officially repeal the old one.
\nAny potential federal rule would be vulnerable in the event of a Republican presidential victory in 2024.
\nEven if it does, Boyle of Earthjustice noted, transport of uncompressed gas \u2014 which is still flammable, if less dramatically so \u2014 is still legal.<\/p>\n

Thehill<\/p>\n

Tags:risks<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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