Train Derailment In North Dakota

We have 2.5 million miles of pipelines in this country alone. Not many people die from pipelines.

Every 90 minutes a car / train accident is recorded, killing 3,000 people a year. If we were to get rid of all pipelines those numbers would sky rocket.
 
Henning said:
However the primary reason it goes by rail and we have no pipeline is that Warren Buffet owns that rail.
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Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns both pipelines and the BNSF railroad. It can win either way.
 
Geico266 said:
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Every 90 minutes a car / train accident is recorded, killing 3,000 people a year. If we were to get rid of all pipelines those numbers would sky rocket.
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Would you happen to have a source to that statistic?
 
Geico266 said:
What difference would it make? According to you only stupid people are killed at rail road crossings.
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Well, it would certainly go a long way to determining if you are credible on the subject or if you just pull numbers out of your a$$ and make stuff up and draw erroneous conclusions based upon fantasy and AM radio talking points.

3000 dead people a year............. Hmmmmmm...... Yeah, let's see that source.
 
Yeah, way to divert from the real point here, there is no way that a train is more efficient than a pipeline.
 
weilke said:
Railroads are safer and more energy efficient than trucks.
Pipelines ar safer and more energy efficient than railroads.

This battle was fought and won 120 years ago when rockefeller moved oil shipping to the pipeline.

One of the reasons why small east coast refineries like Trainer shut down was the lack of reasonably priced crude.
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Exactly. :yes:
 
Geico266 said:
Add in pedestrians killed, rail workers killed, people injured... Close enough in round numbers.

So as you and Jose wish, if we get rid of all pipelines those numbers would not rise?
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Great, we should add in pedestrians, rail workers to get your "close enough in round numbers". Do you have a link for those? You certainly had a very specific "every 90 minutes" and a "3000 killed", so it shouldn't be hard for you to share with the rest your source. This is a national epidemic and we must warn the rest of the AM radio listeners.

And who has said we should "get rid of all pipelines"? Or, is that something else you are making up?
 
Moving oil to rails is a result of this administrations moron policies, not because of any economic or efficiency advantage. It's another case of the law of unintended consequences.

Anyone with an ounce of common sense and yes, critical thinking ability, will realize that a pipeline is a much better way to move crude long distances. Each rail car carries about 30,000 gallons of crude, in 2013 about 400,000 rail oil cars will be transported throughout the country versus about 11,000 in 2009. Think about it, each one of those cars needs to be loaded then unloaded. Each car has many rotating points of potential failure, and each car is carrying the energy potential greater than a quarter million pounds of tnt. How is that rolling through neighborhoods, over bridges, through rr crossing and through tunnels a better idea than a few strategic pipelines? It is not.

Here is an article that touches upon the economics of moving oil by rail.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303332904579224000594400852
 
The Keystone Pipeline was scheduled to be completed 4 or 5 years ago, ( with private money) but delayed for stupid environmental and political reasons and is still not approved do current politics. The North Dakota leg of this pipeline would have probably prevented this disaster.
 
weilke said:
Shipping crude by pipeline costs a fraction of shipping it by rail. One reason we have to ship crude all over gods creation is that the paperwork process to build a new refinery (or even to expand an existing one) is so cumbersome.

The price of ND crude has has allways been discounted due to the lack of shipping capacity. As a result, it only made sense to drill when prices are high. It doesn't have to be the keystone XL, but projects like the Sandpiper are key to making the oil boom in western ND sustainable.
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There's no market demand for new refineries. US oil consumption has most likely peaked. That's why you see some of the majors trying to sell off their refineries, and why you've seen some close.
 
FormerHangie said:
There's no market demand for new refineries. US oil consumption has most likely peaked. That's why you see some of the majors trying to sell off their refineries, and why you've seen some close.
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I would think environmental regs have had more to do with that than demand. The price of refined product is still higher than 6 years ago. Gas was $1.85 then, $3.25 now. :dunno:
 
Geico266 said:
I would think environmental regs have had more to do with that than demand. The price of refined product is still higher than 6 years ago. Gas was $1.85 then, $3.25 now. :dunno:
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Then why aren't the refiners making big money? There is a reason the refineries are being sold (to people like Delta) by people who are much smarter and experienced.


Did you see the news that more than 3000 people died in Experimental airplanes last year? Horrible, absolutely horrible.
 
Dear mods - why isn't this thread in SZ? It clearly took a turn away from HT somewhere around post 2.
 
PaulS said:
Moving oil to rails is a result of this administrations moron policies, not because of any economic or efficiency advantage. It's another case of the law of unintended consequences.

Anyone with an ounce of common sense and yes, critical thinking ability, will realize that a pipeline is a much better way to move crude long distances. Each rail car carries about 30,000 gallons of crude, in 2013 about 400,000 rail oil cars will be transported throughout the country versus about 11,000 in 2009. Think about it, each one of those cars needs to be loaded then unloaded. Each car has many rotating points of potential failure, and each car is carrying the energy potential greater than a quarter million pounds of tnt. How is that rolling through neighborhoods, over bridges, through rr crossing and through tunnels a better idea than a few strategic pipelines? It is not.

Here is an article that touches upon the economics of moving oil by rail.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303332904579224000594400852
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It is more than just lowest cost economics. Flexibility has a value that is being paid for by the refiners.


The "explosive growth" in U.S. energy production–and the relative attractiveness of rail–has allowed companies like Valero Energy to migrate from port-to-port oil tankers to trains instead, said Bill Day, a Valero spokesman.
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. This week, Cenovus Energy, a Canadian oil company with several U.S. refineries, announced that it would dramatically increase the amount of oil it ships via train, from 6,000 barrels to 30,000 by the end of 2014.

Pipes "have high barriers to entry, large commitments to make piplines grow, a short list of companies that can back them and a long lead time to construct them" said Richard Dembicki, Cenovus' director of crude oil marketing, in an interview.

By contrast, freight trains "are easier to contract usage and expand…and have the ability to target higher value markets," he said.
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Cnbc article: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100831924
 
Geico266 said:
The Keystone Pipeline was scheduled to be completed 4 or 5 years ago, ( with private money) but delayed for stupid environmental and political reasons and is still not approved do current politics. The North Dakota leg of this pipeline would have probably prevented this disaster.
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Keystone is supposed to head to Texas, there is already a huge backlog of oil in Cushing OK waiting to go. Bakken Crude mostly heads to the east coast. How would Keystone, which will be running Canadian oil sands crude at capacity prevent this? There's pipes running out of Bakken already, one of them just leaked all over a farmer's fields.

The key issue is to get away from this century+ old, out dated energy technology altogether.
 
JoseCuervo said:
It is more than just lowest cost economics. Flexibility has a value that is being paid for by the refiners.








Cnbc article: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100831924
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Pipeline would be much more flexible and efficient as they are typically routed to a seaport or even a railyard located much closer to the refinery. This market is solely driven by moron bureaucrats in the way of progress and efficiency to make some political point. Again the consumer pays for this stupidity.
 
JoseCuervo said:
Kind of one of the big new learnings is that shipping crude by rail is economical AND allows for unrivaled flexibility. Refineries all over can adjust supply of incoming crude to be optimal in methods and ways impossible with pipelines.

The need for pipelines is overstated by people who listen to AM radio.
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I'm just sitting here laughing as someone who can call up at least three senior pipeline (they also handle rail) folks and ask them where Bakken crude is going.

It definitely isn't going to "refineries all over". ROFLMAO.

You definitely don't work or know anyone in the industry do you?

Crude goes to whomever buys it. And you only buy it if you have a way to get it to your refinery. You also don't send it to refineries not equipped to process certain kinds of crude.

Shipping Wyoming crude to a refinery set up to process Bakken would be a disaster. And vice-versa. As an example.

The routes and amounts are about 80% known before a contract year even starts. The traders play games with the rest as units go up and down at refineries and tanks are either full or empty. Refinery run rates including normal maintenance down times are known by the transportation managers like you'd know what side of bed you roll out in the morning on. The juggling only starts when something breaks.

Plus it's all multi-modal anyway. Most crude starts on trucks until a field is big enough to warrant a pipeline out of it. Even then it may be pumped to tankage, put on another truck, pumped into a train car, and then pumped into tankage at a pipeline head-end somewhere else. Bigger longer pipelines like Keystone are just dropping off points.

But the routes *most* crude take rarely change unless there's a significant cost decrease to build a different route or a company that didn't take a particular type of crude decides to upgrade a refinery and start accepting it.

Warren Buffett got early info on the Bakken starting to hit with frac'ing and horizontal drilling and saw the only way out for that much crude was rail cars, so he bought the railroad. He's making bank on it. Smart.
 
JoseCuervo said:
Kind of one of the big new learnings is that shipping crude by rail is economical AND allows for unrivaled flexibility. Refineries all over can adjust supply of incoming crude to be optimal in methods and ways impossible with pipelines.

The need for pipelines is overstated by people who listen to AM radio.
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Ah, the business theory that drove the era of the Robber Barons. (Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Mellon, Flagler, et. al.).
 
PaulS said:
Pipeline would be much more flexible and efficient as they are typically routed to a seaport or even a railyard located much closer to the refinery. This market is solely driven by moron bureaucrats in the way of progress and efficiency to make some political point. Again the consumer pays for this stupidity.
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Ahhhhh...... The flexible pipeline..... What a great invention. I forgot somebody invented the technology to have a flexible pipeline.


Funny how the guys in the CNBC article that run the refineries were extolling the benefits of the flexibility of rail compared to pipelines. Something doesn't quite make sense.
 
JoseCuervo said:
Ahhhhh...... The flexible pipeline..... What a great invention. I forgot somebody invented the technology to have a flexible pipeline.


Funny how the guys in the CNBC article that run the refineries were extolling the benefits of the flexibility of rail compared to pipelines. Something doesn't quite make sense.
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They did, there is plastic pipeline available.
 
denverpilot said:
I'm just sitting here laughing as someone who can call up at least three senior pipeline (they also handle rail) folks and ask them where Bakken crude is going.

It definitely isn't going to "refineries all over". ROFLMAO.

You definitely don't work or know anyone in the industry do you?

Crude goes to whomever buys it. And you only buy it if you have a way to get it to your refinery. You also don't send it to refineries not equipped to process certain kinds of crude.

Shipping Wyoming crude to a refinery set up to process Bakken would be a disaster. And vice-versa. As an example.

The routes and amounts are about 80% known before a contract year even starts. The traders play games with the rest as units go up and down at refineries and tanks are either full or empty. Refinery run rates including normal maintenance down times are known by the transportation managers like you'd know what side of bed you roll out in the morning on. The juggling only starts when something breaks.

Plus it's all multi-modal anyway. Most crude starts on trucks until a field is big enough to warrant a pipeline out of it. Even then it may be pumped to tankage, put on another truck, pumped into a train car, and then pumped into tankage at a pipeline head-end somewhere else. Bigger longer pipelines like Keystone are just dropping off points.

But the routes *most* crude take rarely change unless there's a significant cost decrease to build a different route or a company that didn't take a particular type of crude decides to upgrade a refinery and start accepting it.

Warren Buffett got early info on the Bakken starting to hit with frac'ing and horizontal drilling and saw the only way out for that much crude was rail cars, so he bought the railroad. He's making bank on it. Smart.
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Yep, some refineries like the sweet stuff, some like the sour stuff. I know of two refineries that share a common fence, one is completely dependent upon tankers coming from Alaska, the one next door has a wharf for tankers and about a mile of train cars sitting outside waiting to offload. Guess which one has more flexibility?
 
Henning said:
They did, there is plastic pipeline available.
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Does it get used much? The last one I saw up close being built (2 years ago) was miles and miles of 3/8" steel pipe. Did a Hell of a lot of damage.
 
JoseCuervo said:
Does it get used much? The last one I saw up close being built (2 years ago) was miles and miles of 3/8" steel pipe. Did a Hell of a lot of damage.
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What did the damage, you mean burying it? You do that damage regardless.
 
OK Jose, how many rr car trips would you need to meet the daily refinery capacity in the US, which is about 16.8 million barrels per day. Let's see a liberal do some math.......
 
Geico266 said:
I would think environmental regs have had more to do with that than demand. The price of refined product is still higher than 6 years ago. Gas was $1.85 then, $3.25 now. :dunno:
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Actually, the price of gasoline six years ago (that would be January, 2008) was around $3.10. It got pushed up to $4.12 midyear 2008 by hedge funds and other traders, then plummeted to that low level you mentioned towards the end 0f 2008 AS THE WORLD ECONOMY COLLAPSED. You know that, I know that, probably everyone on this message board above the age of about 25 knows that, yet you choose to blame that on the bad old environmentalists. That's disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst. The current national average price for gasoline, which is around $3.30 per gallon, is essentially the same as it was six years ago, adjusted for inflation.

Here's the retail gasoline price chart if anyone wants to see it.
ch.gaschart


Barring another economic collapse, cheap oil isn't coming back. Know why? Because the new oil finds, such as tight oil from fracked fields, tar sands, and oil from deepwater wells is expensive to produce. Crude goes below $80 per barrel, those types of oil stop getting produced.
 
Henning said:
Pipelines leak and explode on a fairly regular basis as well, both have their issues.
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10-15 people per year get killed in pipeline accidents, most of them company workers. Those numbers include gathering systems and gas distribution.

Every couple of years there is an accident that kills members of the general public, those accidents tend to get a lot of attention.

There are 250-300 fatal accidents at grade crossings every year.

If I was to rank my risk of getting killed by lightning strike, wayward rail-car or pipeline explosion, pipeline is pretty darn low on the list. My home used to sit 120ft from a products pipeline that ran past my backyard. Pipeline company was a good neighbor, as long as I didn't build anything on their row or drove any pilings they didn't care what we did with their land.
 
PaulS said:
OK Jose, how many rr car trips would you need to meet the daily refinery capacity in the US, which is about 16.8 million barrels per day. Let's see a liberal do some math.......
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Uh-oooh, that's not gonna be pretty.
 
FormerHangie said:
Actually, the price of gasoline six years ago (that would be January, 2008) was around $3.10. It got pushed up to $4.12 midyear 2008 by hedge funds and other traders, then plummeted to that low level you mentioned towards the end 0f 2008 AS THE WORLD ECONOMY COLLAPSED. You know that, I know that, probably everyone on this message board above the age of about 25 knows that, yet you choose to blame that on the bad old environmentalists. That's disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst. The current national average price for gasoline, which is around $3.30 per gallon, is essentially the same as it was six years ago, adjusted for inflation.

Here's the retail gasoline price chart if anyone wants to see it.
ch.gaschart


Barring another economic collapse, cheap oil isn't coming back. Know why? Because the new oil finds, such as tight oil from fracked fields, tar sands, and oil from deepwater wells is expensive to produce. Crude goes below $80 per barrel, those types of oil stop getting produced.
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Yep, in the summer or just before in 2008 Bush began giving oil leases on public land, production was forecast to go through the roof in 2009 with the resultant lower prices because oil is a futures market. Thenl Barry came in, closed the federal land back down and stopped the projected production. The only thing that saved us from 5 or 6 dollar a gallon gas after that was production on private and state owned land took up the slack and then some. Open the federal lands back up the way Bush did and see what happens to the price.
 
weilke said:
10-15 people per year get killed in pipeline accidents, most of them company workers. Those numbers include gathering systems and gas distribution.

Every couple of years there is an accident that kills members of the general public, those accidents tend to get a lot of attention.

There are 250-300 fatal accidents at grade crossings every year.

If I was to rank my risk of getting killed by lightning strike, wayward rail-car or pipeline explosion, pipeline is pretty darn low on the list. My home used to sit 120ft from a products pipeline that ran past my backyard. Pipeline company was a good neighbor, as long as I didn't build anything on their row or drove any pilings they didn't care what we did with their land.
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I did not know that oil was the only thing being transported by rail and killing people, thanks for the enlightenment. Don't get me wrong, I have no great issue with pipelines, but they are not a fool proof panacea. Adding a pipeline from N.Dakota to New Jersey will not end train related deaths, most the result of human stupidity rather than inherent danger of railroads.

Interesting thing I've noticed on the last couple of long haul drives I've done, I haven't seen an JB Hunt trailers on the open highway, it used to be every 5th rig or so was JB Hunt. However when a train would go by, large segments had JB Hunt gear on them.
 
Henning said:
I did not know that oil was the only thing being transported by rail and killing people, thanks for the enlightenment.
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And I didn't say that, did I ?

As a mode of transportation, I am far less likely to get hurt by a rail accident than a trucking accident. The risk to be hurt from a pipeline accident is near impossible to measure it is so small.
 
weilke said:
And I didn't say that, did I ?

As a mode of transportation, I am far less likely to get hurt by a rail accident than a trucking accident. The risk to be hurt from a pipeline accident is near impossible to measure it is so small.
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Similarly the additional risk of being injured because of the increase in rail traffic from oil cars alone is also so small it would be near impossible to measure.
 
Henning said:
Interesting thing I've noticed on the last couple of long haul drives I've done, I haven't seen an JB Hunt trailers on the open highway, it used to be every 5th rig or so was JB Hunt. However when a train would go by, large segments had JB Hunt gear on them.
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Costs less to ship them by rail than provide tractors and pay drivers. Hunt, and others now prefer the short haul after the train does the legwork.
 
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