I don't think anyone want to tie up capital to build such a facility for a commodity that's as volitle (economically ) as oil.
Plus - look at the storm over building simple coal transfer facilities on the West Coast. Imagine announcing to at least a couple of small lakeside towns that you're going to concentrate all the liquid death on the tracks in your town, store it there, and then transfer it to the floating bombs just down the beach from your bed and breakfast colony - and vice versa somewhere else.
coborn35 ...putting all that oil on the great lakes is a good idea.
Well, the last ship to sink on the Great Lakes was the Fitzgerald...
I was listening in to "Seaway Clayton" some years ago - they control the traffic on the St. Lawrence River from Lake Ontario to around Cardinal, ON. One downbound (EB) ship gave a rundown of what they were carrying - and it was positively scary - very, very flammable. If it were to blow up in the narrower portions of the river, it would result in another Texas City.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
CSSHEGEWISCH coborn35 Absolutely not. Do not want the risk of ruining my fine city and water over knee jerk reactions. Would that include the knee-jerk reactions in relation to tailings disposal by Reserve Mining Company in the mid to late 1970's?
coborn35 Absolutely not. Do not want the risk of ruining my fine city and water over knee jerk reactions.
Absolutely not. Do not want the risk of ruining my fine city and water over knee jerk reactions.
Would that include the knee-jerk reactions in relation to tailings disposal by Reserve Mining Company in the mid to late 1970's?
Well A. Silver Bay is about 40 miles north of Duluth...
B. I fail to see how how the older generations ignorance of environmental issues relates at all to a few trains derailing and everyone thinking putting all that oil on the great lakes is a good idea.
Mechanical Department "No no that's fine shove that 20 pound set all around the yard... those shoes aren't hell and a half to change..."
The Missabe Road: Safety First
The grain infrastructure was established long ago and ore, to the best of my knowledge, isn't mined during the winter. And ore and coal can just be stored in piles on the ground.
Oil is a year round business and we're in an era where a large tank farm is going to cost far more than it comparatively would've cost 80-100 years ago to construct something of similar capacity, a time when most of the grain storage infrastructure in places like Duluth was constructed.
There's plenty of petrochemical shipping on the Great Lakes system. So if it makes sense, I'm sure a company will pursue it. Some of the few new hulls being built on the American side in recent years have been tank barges, for example.
And Canada has two tanker fleets that do much of their trading on the Great Lakes.
If the opportunities exist and it makes sense, someone like Algoma Central will pop up to serve the need.
We have to look at why Powder River coal and grain Iron Ore dont use an all rail route to begin with and for the last 50 years even with Great Lakes freezing up a rail/boat combo has worked. It might have to do with turnaround time and cost of dead heading railroad cars of unit trains.
There was aproposal by Calumet Superior to transload crude from pipeline to barge at Duluth two years ago, but I can't find anything recent on it.
Transloading oil to barges along the Upper Mississippi and down to the gulf has not been reported to any great extent. Perhaps for many of the same reasons.
When the lakes freeze up, I suppose they would then have to switch to an all rail route, and....
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Leo the issue with these derailments go far beyond the tree huggers or any other deoragatory name you associate with green folks. Thier frequency and potential for disaster got the people huggers concern.
A temporary and simple solution for now is to slow these trains down. I know it will added to congestion issues. However its better for the operators than regulators to be proactive until a better understanding of the causes and long term solutions applied.
Two words -
Edmund Fitzgerald
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
The St Lawrence River dealt with a significant oil spill some years ago - I'm sure the institutional memory is still fresh...
Leo_Ames , as already being on a collision course to turning the Great Lakes and its associated rivers into the world's largest Love Canal.
, as already being on a collision course to turning the Great Lakes and its associated rivers into the world's largest Love Canal.
Tankers on the Great Lakes have never been very large. Many were designed for specific routes and had limitations on hull length and superstructure so they fit under bridges (not all are movable) and through tight river and canal channels. Many loading and unloading points are some distance from open water.
The NIMBYs don't stop where the water begins. Groups like Save the River do their best to portray the shipping industry , the most environmentally friendly of them all, as already being on a collision course to turning the Great Lakes and its associated rivers into the world's largest Love Canal.
Plus, there's the issue of the system largely shutting down for several weeks each winter. What do you do with the oil that's produced when winter holds an icy grip on the lakes? Oil production isn't a seasonal commodity and is being pumped year round.
The steamer Arthur M. Anderson just spent a month battling ice on a trip that normally just takes a few days, for example. It just isn't very practical for the most part during this time of year since the trips take so long and the risk is high of damage, as they found out during the winter navigation experiments back 40 years ago or this latest incident.
Plus, not all the cruide oil goes this way.
Need to make rail work since it's the most flexible method to plug the gaps in the network of pipelines and fully meet the demands of these new oil sources. Plus, anyone that thinks that there's any fully safe transportation method is nuts.
Disasters aren't something unknown to pipelines, but nobody seems to want to remember the long lists of incidents and many lives that have been taken due to them over the years. And much of it if it's not going to be going on steel rails where pipelines are unavailable, is going to be going by truck.
Not difficult to figure out where that one stacks up compared to rail where safety is concerned.
rail to duluth and then tanker to everywhere else on the planet
Hey if its works for grain...
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