Crash Test Dummies

Crash Test Dummies

 The White House decides oil trains are the new Keystone pipeline.

From the Wall Street Journal

Many thinkers on the center-right assume that the vast economic benefits of the U.S.-Canadian energy boom are enough to erode political opposition, but don’t be so sure. The anticarbon lobby is devising ever-more irrational ways to obstruct oil and gas production, now including a federal plan to knock out the railroads.

The White House blockade of the Keystone XL and other modern pipelines hasn’t stopped domestic fracking or development of the Alberta oil sands. Instead, the industry transports oil and natural gas to refiners and midstream companies using the technology of the 19th century: Seven of every 10 barrels from North Dakota’s Bakken shale move by rail, and total U.S. carloads of crude oil have increased 4000% since 2008.

So now President Obama ’s regulators have turned their gaze to the ostensible dangers of trains. Using the pretext of high-profile derailments like the 2013 Lac-Mégantic oil explosion that killed 47 people and destroyed parts of the Quebec town, a transportation agency called the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration is imposing new tanker design standards. Within three years, most of the 334,869 cars in the North American fleet must be retrofitted with thicker steel jackets, heat shields, better brakes and the like.

The exact specifications are still under development, but the explanation for any of the options can only be overexcitement about fossil fuels. Regulators claim to be acting in the name of safety, but according to Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) data, 99.9977% of potentially dangerous cargo arrives at its destination without incident.

“Rail has never been safer,” as an FRA policy statement put it in February. In a speech last year, Obama-appointed FRA administrator Joseph Szabo declared, “As I have said repeatedly, 2012—by virtually all measures—was the safest year in railroading history, with train accidents down a remarkable 43% in 10 years. And among the millions of annual shipments of hazardous materials by rail, less than a fraction of 1% of these has resulted in any type of release.”

Rather than hardening tank cars to allegedly mitigate the outstanding 0.0023% of accidents, the priority ought to be preventing crashes. Some 88% of derailments are the result of cracked, split or washed-out tracks and welding, exceeding the average of all other causes by sevenfold. The most lenient retrofit mandate will require capital investment of $3 billion minimum—money that would be better spent on track maintenance and inspection. (Human error is the other big cause. Does the Administration plan to ban that too?)

But maybe not so strangely, the new design mandates fail by their own definition, at least if the goal is abating damage from those spills that will inevitably occur. The most stringent retrofit would prevent tank punctures when a train crashes at 20 miles per hour or less. But all of the major derailments of recent years in Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania were travelling much faster; the lead car at Lac-Mégantic was moving at 65 mph.

Meantime, the added weight of the fortifications means cars are able to carry fewer gallons, which either creates bottlenecks, or more cars must be added to transport the same amount of product. More and heavier traffic increases wear and deterioration of tracks—thus compounding the risk of an accident.

It’s hard not to conclude that the real motive is to force tens of thousands of tankers off the rails and slow oil and gas development. Work shops and repair facilities are a limited resource and the status quo can only handle retrofits for about 6,400 cars per year. Manufacturing new cars is costly and unnecessary but in any case can’t be ramped up overnight. By one industry estimate, the plan could bring as much as half of North Dakota’s oil production (where there are few pipelines) off line for lack of transport.

The intelligent alternative would be to approve high-tech pipelines like Keystone that are even more secure than rail and have a smaller “carbon footprint” too. Yet the White House prefers to disable the next-best alternative to Keystone. The gambit won’t increase safety—the industry could turn to trucks—but it will please the Democratic Party’s rich green funders, who want to shut down all fossil-fuel production, one step at a time.