"...Lest we think that it can't be done by rail, from another forum (Yahoo NS Altoona - Johnstown - see: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/nsaltoonajohnstown/ ), one of the members there - Josh Hollands - photographed NS train symbol "64D" (Baaken Shale crude oil, to ???, apparently the very first one of that symbol to traverse the NS PIttsburgh Line) at Newport, PA on Friday, Jan. 20, 2012, including this brand-new tank car DBUX 303010 placarded "1267' for crude oil (not my photo).."
PAUL:
link to the following mentioned post:ref: "New Destination for Bakken Crude"
http://cs.trains.com/TRCCS/forums/t/201890.aspx
A post today By Beaulieu indicates the that there is a new destination in New Jersey for Bakken Crude:
Many thanks for your perspective. It has been useful
I certainly hope that BNSF, CP and CN are sharpening their pencils.
Many thanks. I checked it out.
Many thanks for the info.
Thanks. Good info.
You must have meant mining tar sands as opposed to drilling for oil.
It is my understanding that the Valero refining enterprise on the Gulf Coast will export their refined product. This has the advantage of the product sold will have a positive impact upon the country's negative balance of trade account.
The President's authority in the pipeline dispute comes the Constitution. He has exclusive authority in international affairs.
Had the TransCanada Company in its promotion of the Keystone XL pipeline been more adept, the construction of a new pipeline across an international border with the USA would never have become the issue that it has become.
Recently in an interview, Governor Brian Schweitzer explained that Montana has approved the pipeline design. Schweitzer explained that but for the international border crossing, the pipeline would have proceeded state by state.
Given the capability of a GATX "tank train," there is no need for the brouhaha that has developed.
Some of the persons who have posted have made plausible arguments for operation "tank trains" the whole way to the Gulf. It is conceivable that a combination of "tank trains" and pipelines move the tar sand oil.
Thanks
There are different kinds of crude oil. Could what you are referring to is that once crude oil has been refined into various products, one companies diesel fuel is the same as the next. It is the refined product that is the market.
The tar sand crude apparently has been identified by Valero Refining as a good crude to refine into diesel fuel with a competitive advantage in the European market.
Pipeline construction is something to behold. Around 2004 I deliberately took a rural road south of the Pennsylvania Turnpike west of Bedford on a trip to Pittsburgh. I was startled to see the existing 24 inch gas pipeline that crosses Pennsylvania having new 36 inch capacity installed, A 50 year old right of way had to be returned to its scalped condition when originally built. The earth was dug and scarred from Allegheny Mountain ridge to the next. Periodic storage depots and equipment depots lined the pipeline right of way observed from the secondary road. Within two years, 2006, the sight was thriving grass. Brush has begun to return. Pennsylvania geography is often amazingly resilient.
Arguably, some of the proposed route over the plains is not nearly as resilient. The concerns for unique aquifers appear to have some merit.
So, if confronted with impediments, why not use a via alaternative - the "tank train."
Thanks for the link.
Very useful photographs.
A quote from a Jan 23rd Bloomberg article:
"Shipping oil using tank cars on rail costs about $3 more a barrel than pipeline transport, using prices in North Dakota, a differential unlikely to slow the development of oil sands crude if no pipeline is build, the State Department said. The gap is shrinking as larger storage terminals are built, the agency said."
That's 3% at $100/bbl. Not a lot, but not nothin' either....
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
WilliamKiesel Had the TransCanada Company in its promotion of the Keystone XL pipeline been more adept, the construction of a new pipeline across an international border with the USA would never have become the issue that it has become.
How so? What should have TransCanada done that they did not do?
Sam, thanks for noting and linking to beaulieu's post and thread on NS' new train symbol "64D" - and to him for providing it there, too !
Don, thanks for that snippet from Bloomberg about the rail vs. pipeline $3/ bbl. cost differential !
See, it can be done ! And I'll wager that $3/ bbl. differential can be reduced some more as more experience is gained, better/ faster loading and unloading terminals are built and placed into operation, and train schedules are 'fine-tuned' to get more 'turns' per year and hence use less cars and locos, etc.
- Paul North.
I have to agree here that a rail routing via CP and CN to the gulf is more feasible than another pipeline. With eyes to the North Slope of AK, their production is dropping steadily over time and articles have been written about what to do to keep it going (the drilling issues ulp there). An railroad up there over the permafrost would have been a maintenace headache (i.e. the Ogden cutoff sinking sub), but here we have a pipeline proposal that would run over temperate ground, where railroads are the king of long distance bulk commodity transport. We have to consider the footprint of the pipeline and what we will do with it once it's useful life is over (way more to do than just a torch). the pipeline will create ~20k jobs to build, but only 75 to 100 to maintain and operate. Early estimate place fewer construction number with a railroute but over double the long term jobs. Railcars, locomotives, and track are more easily reclaimed, and we would onlt have to abandon a scant number of miles of track since most of the route is on existing ROW serving other needs for the host railroad.
In the 1970's the PRB was a new novelty of unit train railroading, now it is a triple track powerhouse (Orin Sub, joint line). I can see a new railroad (BNSF or CN/CP) corridor empire rise anew. BNSF conqured Abo Canyon again and their transcon is nearly complete. So to could be double and triple track CTC on 140 lb rail, strong ties, and high ballast.
I have been following this thread with great interest, but wonder why no one has thought of this idea. Why transport the crude anywhere? Have the XL pipeline end about 10 miles east of Williston ND or some such town on the BNSF, and build a refinery THERE! You could also then transport the Bracken oil there as well. Then just transport the finished products where ever they are needed. It doesn't have to go to Texas. Terminals could be built or already exist in Minneapolis/St Paul, LaCross WI, Savanna Il, and the Chicago area to receive and distribute the finished product. Portions of the train could be handed off in LaCross to the CP, or Minneapolis to the UP to feed the Milwaukee area as well. The extra trains would incentivise BNSF to double track the single portions of its northern mainline and this could be done while the refinery was being built. I suspect the building and operating of the refinery would create about the same amout of jobs as building a pipeline. You would create even more jobs building the tank cars and extra engines needed as well as for crews to operate them. So why build a refinery in North Dakota? Fewer NIMBYS. Lots of open range. Build it downwind of any town or city and give any pollution a chance to disburse before it bothers anybody. There is not much east of Williston until you get to Minot ND. Many refineries that have closed were because of local opposition as one writer pointed out are sitting idle, so build one where the oil is and there are few people to bother.
oltmannd A quote from a Jan 23rd Bloomberg article: "Shipping oil using tank cars on rail costs about $3 more a barrel than pipeline transport, using prices in North Dakota, a differential unlikely to slow the development of oil sands crude if no pipeline is build, the State Department said. The gap is shrinking as larger storage terminals are built, the agency said." That's 3% at $100/bbl. Not a lot, but not nothin' either....
AS an interesting aside to this piece that Don (oltmand) mentions. Drudge Report has a line posed on its headline area about this, but the intimation is referencing the Politics of the XL Pipeline (denial of permit)
From Drudge Report (01/24/2012b):
"Buffett's Railroad WINNER From Obama's Keystone Pipeline
Denial..."
Unfortunately the link (To Bloomberg article) shows as a bad link, right now.
Found a similar link that makes the same 'insinuation':
http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/more-north-dakota-oil-will-travel-by-rail-with-no/article_f8f6b4f1-2715-5d66-a192-f2f2ae2923ee.html
"More North Dakota oil will travel by rail with no Keystone XL pipeline"
By Staff at Billings (Mt.) Gazette [Briefly from the article]
FTA:"..."If the (Keystone XL) is blocked or delayed, we still have to meet our transportation needs," Kringstad said. "It's pretty simple."
BNSF Railway Co. hauls about 75 percent of the oil that now leaves North Dakota by train, Kringstad said..."
With politics being on the spear point of many public and private discussions, the inuendo of some kind of collusion seems to be the point of this conversation. (Or who is pandering to whom)
and Warreen Buffet has this current YouTube video out with his Ukulele solo in celebration of the Chinese New Year " I've Been Workin' on the Railroad"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBKwTSBBn7U
I'm trying to avoid political frays on Trains.com, but now it's become inevitable:
Bloomberg.com ran a news story yeaterday stating, in effect, that the biggest beneficiary of the Keystone XL delay/nix/disapproval/whatever stands to be BNSF--now owned by Berkshire Hathaway, which for all practical purposes is controlled and partially owned by Warren Buffett--a known Obama supporter.
When the story got picked up and trumpeted by many right-wing-leaning blogs and "news aggregator" sites such as Andrew Breitbart's Big Government, TeaParty.org, Instapundit.com, and others......
....... Bloomberg killed the story.
The original story link, which now (as of this typing) 404's: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-23/buffett-s-burlington-northern-among-winners-in-obama-rejection-of-pipeline.html
To see it elsewhere, do an Internet search, or look at:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/01/23/bloomberg_articlesLY20WE6K50Z001-LY9YF.DTL
http://biggovernment.com/publius/2012/01/24/report-obama-supporter-buffett-to-profit-from-rejection-of-keystone-xl-pipeline/
Why did Bloomberg yank the story? Apply your preferred "conspiracy theory" or "journalism bias" ideas as you see fit.
dcaddock - Welcome to Trains.com!
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Delaware and Hudson Virtual Museum (DHVM), Railroad Adventures (RRAdventures)
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dcaddock I have been following this thread with great interest, but wonder why no one has thought of this idea. Why transport the crude anywhere? Have the XL pipeline end about 10 miles east of Williston ND or some such town on the BNSF, and build a refinery THERE!
I have been following this thread with great interest, but wonder why no one has thought of this idea. Why transport the crude anywhere? Have the XL pipeline end about 10 miles east of Williston ND or some such town on the BNSF, and build a refinery THERE!
I would speculate that the main impediment would be the risk of investing in the start of a greatly prolonged permitting and approval process of unpredictable duration, with no certainty that the project would be approved in the end. It would be similar to the experience of the XL pipeline project. Capitalists cannot afford to risk the cost of pressing a project that the regulators are fundamentally opposed to on an ideological basis.
Bucyrus dcaddock: I have been following this thread with great interest, but wonder why no one has thought of this idea. Why transport the crude anywhere? Have the XL pipeline end about 10 miles east of Williston ND or some such town on the BNSF, and build a refinery THERE! I would speculate that the main impediment would be the risk of investing in the start of a greatly prolonged permitting and approval process of unpredictable duration, with no certainty that the project would be approved in the end. It would be similar to the experience of the XL pipeline project. Capitalists cannot afford to risk the cost of pressing a project that the regulators are fundamentally opposed to on an ideological basis.
dcaddock: I have been following this thread with great interest, but wonder why no one has thought of this idea. Why transport the crude anywhere? Have the XL pipeline end about 10 miles east of Williston ND or some such town on the BNSF, and build a refinery THERE!
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Bucyrus WilliamKiesel: Had the TransCanada Company in its promotion of the Keystone XL pipeline been more adept, the construction of a new pipeline across an international border with the USA would never have become the issue that it has become. How so? What should have TransCanada done that they did not do?
WilliamKiesel: Had the TransCanada Company in its promotion of the Keystone XL pipeline been more adept, the construction of a new pipeline across an international border with the USA would never have become the issue that it has become.
dcaddock I have been following this thread with great interest, but wonder why no one has thought of this idea. Why transport the crude anywhere? Have the XL pipeline end about 10 miles east of Williston ND or some such town on the BNSF, and build a refinery THERE! You could also then transport the Bracken oil there as well. Then just transport the finished products where ever they are needed. . . . [snipped] . . . So why build a refinery in North Dakota? Fewer NIMBYS. Lots of open range. Build it downwind of any town or city and give any pollution a chance to disburse before it bothers anybody. There is not much east of Williston until you get to Minot ND. Many refineries that have closed were because of local opposition as one writer pointed out are sitting idle, so build one where the oil is and there are few people to bother.
The supposed problem with building the refinery near the oil field - according to others on this thread and other similar ones in the past - is that the refinery's economic life is usually 40 to 50 years, and maybe longer (some are now approaching 100 years). As such, the refinery will likely outlive the productive life of the oil field - at the end of which the refinery would be economically and literally 'stranded' without either a nearby source of crude oil, or a built and sufficiently cheap (i.e., already paid-for) in-use inbound crude oil transportation system (such as from rail, barges, or tankers, etc.). I use the qualifier "supposed" because the refinery owners likely depreciate, "write-off", and recover their investment to build it over its first 10 to 20 years or so anyway - the remaining 20 to 30 years of service life is just icing on the cake, so to speak - but that's how the thinking and analysis seems to go.
However, I do wonder about the other aspect of this comment - instead of all the tankcars coming back empty for the same distance, if some of them couldn't be used to haul a refined product that wouldn't be contaminated or adulterated too much by any crude oil residue still left in the cars. Say, something like No. 6 residual oil, tar, creosote, bitumen or asphalt for roofing shingles and to pave roads with, waterproofing uses, etc. It might cause some 'loose-car' railroading, and some triangle-shaped routes (crude from ND to refinery, product from refinery to user, then empty from user back to ND, etc.), but it might be worth something to get rid of some of those many empty miles that would otherwise be incurred for both loaded moves.
Finally, I thought there was a proposal to use some closed military bases as sites for new refineries ? In any event, there are some 'mothballed' ones available - both Sunoco refineries in the Philadelphia area were closed down in the last several months and are for sale, as is another one (Conoco or Chevron, can't remember which). I know that cost economics and the locations of the consuming markets are huge factors and not always favorably situated or aligned - but still, I'd think it would be cheaper to send the domestic crude to Philly to be refined than to import oil from the MIddle East.
Have we considered the current (apparent ) strategy of this administration is to create obstacles for any use of oil???
I have.
1) We are dealing with investors here. They are not looking to build piplines, move crude, or refine oil. They are looking to make money. So this is the plan that has been given to them which shows them how much money...not about piplines being built and people being employed, not about amounts of crude, not about refining anything, just how much money they will make. Sold all American!
2) The PR people are touting jobs building the pipeline, Quick, build the pipeline and back in the unemployment line jobs. Shoring up a rail line or two, building some new connections, and running trains for years will produce long term jobs and in turn, economic growth.
3) The politics at work are to make Obama and his party look bad no matter what happens. This is a term of damned if he did, damned if he don't, damned if he so much as says or thinks. The thinking is that anything they can do that will contribute to making him look bad, the better off they are.
4) This whole world oil situtation is upside down. This stuff is actually to be refined or otherwise prepared to got to China and not the US market. Our investors make more money on mid eastern imported crude in their business set up. Iranian oil which might be pulled from the world (US) market and go to China instead is a double whammy in that American investors will not make money on the oil not imported from Iran nor on the sale of oil to China since China will be buying Iranian oil. Can the investors actually afford to sell North American oil to Canada and the US and still make money?
5) The American public is being played. Again.
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The basic issue for tar sands crude is that it is more corrosive than normal crude petroleum. Transporting it via pipeline requires higher temperatures and pressures in comparison to regular crude petroleum. The tar sand bitumen product has mixed with it "wet" gasses (ethane, butane etc.). These wet gasses under pressure remain as a liquid. Pipeline pressure variations cab set the stage for the "wet" gas to change from liquid to gas in the product column being pumped. This can cause pipeline operating decisions that can contribute to pipeline failure. As bitumen sinks rather than floats, when there is a pipeline failure the resulting clean up is much, much more problematic. Canadian experience with the corrosion problem has demonstrated a pipeline failure experience significantly worse than regular crude oil pipelines.
The "tank-train" would be significantly less dangerous should a spill occur.
The nature of the tar sand crude product requires unique refinery capacity. Apparently that uniqueness is possessed by the Valero refinery on the Gulf coast.
Finally, the additional transport capacity created across the international boundary between Canada and USA brings the pipeline under the Executive's review as the President is responsible for international affairs.
Henry,
I am still connecting the dots in your analysis, but in the meantime, regarding your item #5, could you please tell me who it is that is playing the American public?
You of all people are asking that? Politicians, highway lobby, oil lobby, investors.
Consider this: Only the railroads and the pipelines have to acquire their own rights-of-way, and then build and maintain their physical networks. All other modes - trucks, water, and air - have public ROWs, and most of their infrastructure initially financed by a governmental entity of some kind.
So although the railroads and pipelines seem to be 'brothers' and similarly disadvantaged or situated in this regard, the important part instead is that the pipelines don't have a huge built-in cost and financing advantage - thus the pipelines are more vulnerable to rail competition than the usual truck competition. And as noted before, the railroad has far more flexibility and can be quicker in changing route and destination choices to take advantage of changing markets and prices than a fixed-in-place pipeline.
henry6 4) This whole world oil situtation is upside down. This stuff is actually to be refined or otherwise prepared to got to China and not the US market. Our investors make more money on mid eastern imported crude in their business set up. Iranian oil which might be pulled from the world (US) market and go to China instead is a double whammy in that American investors will not make money on the oil not imported from Iran nor on the sale of oil to China since China will be buying Iranian oil. Can the investors actually afford to sell North American oil to Canada and the US and still make money?
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