Let’s refine crude oil carload numbers: Going inside the industry

Crude oil empties roll west through Western Springs, Ill., on BNSF Railway tracks in September 2013. Jim Wrinn photo

All Class I railroads post weekly car-counts on their websites. The categories are straight from the Association of American Railroads’s classification list and so are pretty much self-explanatory. The exception is “Petroleum Products.” This category shows all crude-oil carloads plus all petroleum products from liquefied petroleum gas to asphalt.

Let’s look more closely at BNSF Railway, just to explore what can be learned. The weekly car-count for Sept. 29 shows 121,000 loads of “petroleum products.” To sort out what is within the quarterly commodity statistics tables, I access usraildesktop.com.  

The numbers are based on historical waybill samples and can help sort trends by the  Standard Transportation Commodity Code or STCC. While the quarterly commodity statistics tables won’t match the BNSF quarterly numbers because the days don’t match, the numbers are close enough to get a sense of relative weights. Comparing the commodity codes for the second quarter of 2013 I found the variance between what BNSF reported and the quarterly statistics to be less than 1 percent.

In second quarter 2013, crude oil cars were 65 percent of total petroleum products. I then applied these percentages to the 121,000 petroleum products loads and compared the resulting break with the actual third quarter break from the quarterly tables. Thus I can say with a fair degree of confidence that crude-oil loads were up 68 percent year-over-year and other petroleum products were off 11 percent in the same period.

From this you may conclude that while crude-by-rail is big business, it represents at BNSF, for example less than 80,000 cars out of a system total of 2.6 million cars —  roughly 3 percent — in the quarter. The pattern holds true industry-wide.