Oil on the Tracks INVESTIGATIVE REPORTERS & EDITORS CONFERENCE RUSSELL GOLD // JUNE

Casselton, N.D. // Dec Tools used: YouTube, ruler & friend

Q: Why is North Dakota Crude Oil Exploding? We found a data source for vapor pressure at the Capline Pipeline website. Then we scraped all the data and put it in an Excel file.

A: It’s the combustible gases Feb 23 WSJ : “Crude oil from North Dakota's Bakken Shale formation contains several times the combustible gases as oil from elsewhere, a Wall Street Journal analysis found, raising new questions about the safety of shipping such crude by rail across the U.S. “Federal investigators are trying to determine whether such vapors are responsible for recent extraordinary explosions of oil-filled railcars, including one that killed several dozen people in Canada last summer.”

Source: Dakota Plains Holding Co. presentation in 2014, available on their website Albany? Mapping the New Energy Landscape Pt. 1

The Rise of a New, More Volatile “Ultralight” Crude Not all crudes are the same. Light and “ultralight” crudes have more gases (ethanes, butanes, etc.) entrained in them. This raises their RVP and makes them more volatile. “The federal government says 96% of the growth in production since 2011 is of light and ultralight oil and that is where growth will continue.” – WSJ 6/24/14 (Sider & Friedman)

How much oil is moving by rail? Annual and Quarterly Freight Commodity Statistics (QCS) Surface Transportation Board… But now it’s easy…

The federal government now tracks: on

The math of crude by rail: million barrels a day (Dec. ‘14) 700 barrels/car = 1,607 car loads Each train is ~ 100 cars – 105 cars So trains departing daily Or, about one every 90 minutes Even at today’s lower level of 990,000 barrels/day – still crude trains/day

“When energy companies started extracting oil from shale formations in South Texas a few years ago, they invested hundreds of millions of dollars to make the volatile crude safer to handle. “In North Dakota's Bakken Shale oil field, nobody installed the necessary equipment. The result is that the second-fastest growing source of crude in the U.S. is producing oil that pipelines often would reject as too dangerous to transport.” To Stabilize or Not to Stabilize

Mapping Crude by Rail Pt. II Find your local SERC: contacts

Goodbye, Jersey City “This isn’t a structural fire that we can knock down in an hour or two,” he said. “This is something we’d be dealing with for days.” -- Jordan Zaretsky, a fire battalion chief in nearby Teaneck, N.J.

Russell