Posted on 03/31/2015 4:55:40 AM PDT by thackney
Edited on 03/31/2015 5:18:22 AM PDT by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
BNSF has started taking additional safety measures for crude oil shipments because of four recent high-profile derailments in the U.S. and Canada, the railroad said Monday.
Under the changes, BNSF is slowing down crude oil trains to 35 mph in cities with more than 100,000 people and increasing track inspections near waterways. The Fort Worth-based railroad also is stepping up efforts to find and repair defective wheels before they can cause derailments.
(Excerpt) Read more at fuelfix.com ...
Or, a pipeline can be built and Berkshire can be sued for a few billion for cleanup costs and destroying the environment with a “possibility” of causing global warming.
Warren Buffet’s killer oil trains appear to be lacking maintenance as they race through population centers. The pipelines are much safer in delivering oil, but he gives campaign money to the Democrats.
Pipelines don’t derail, and don’t pay bribes to politicians, so we don’t get a pipeline.
I’m no math wizard but as I see it, reducing the number of oil carrying rail cars per train, limiting rail speeds through populated areas plus a host of other issues designed to increase the time it takes to transport crude oil to the refineries only INCREASES the cost to produce gasoline, the same gasoline the usurper in chief wants to cost $8.00/gallon. We definitely NEED that pipeline and if Reagan were around he would say, “Mister President, approve that pipeline”.
I think your math is pretty good.
ND certainly has some oil pipelines, just not enough.
https://ndpipelines.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/nd-crude-oil-map-march-2015.pdf
http://www.northamericashaleblog.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/86/2015/03/COLLINS-1.png
I learned recently that the railroads of old man Cornelius Vanderbilt enabled a young John D Rockefeller to build Standard Oil
It was the railroads that permitted the growth of the oil refining industry from day one
At age 19, Rockefeller and a partner opened their own produce-shipping business. His combination of meticulousness and skillful analysis helped return their initial capital within their first year. The business continued to grow during the Civil War, as the war efforts meant higher grain prices and higher transportation prices.
Soon Rockefeller had a good amount of money with which to invest. He (correctly) believed railroads would become the primary means to transport agricultural products and would open up the vast western lands to eastern markets trends that didn’t bode well for his own produce shipping. He began to look for other business ventures that could be profitable and found a fledgling sector poised to take off: the oil industry.
However, where he and his partners entered was not in oil production, but its refining. The same railroads that would eclipse his shipping business would help launch his refining venture, as Cleveland enjoyed not the usual one rail line, but two. Transportation costs would be lower and thus his refinery products more competitive.
By the late 1860s, only five years after getting into the oil business, Rockefeller’s refining company was the largest in the world. A major reason for his success was a business model that today we call vertical integration.
Rockefeller knew that in order to keep costs down, he would have to control both the upstream and the downstream. For example, he even bought his own woodlands for lumber to make his own oil barrels, and built kilns on-site to dry the lumber and save shipping weight on its way to (his own) cooperage. His attention to cost-cutting was painstaking.
Small surprise, then, that the cost efficiencies of transporting oil via pipeline lured Rockefeller as soon as he heard about them. And he realized that if he owned enough pipelines, he could also dictate how much he paid for the oil that went into his refineries.
Standard Oil was born of this ambition in 1870, with Rockefeller as majority partner. In what’s been dubbed the “Cleveland Conquest” or the “Cleveland Massacre” (depending on your point of view), Standard Oil bought out or put under almost three-quarters of its Cleveland rivals in 1872 alone. By 1877, the company controlled some 90% of America’s refineries and pipelines.
http://www.caseyresearch.com/articles/how-rockefeller-parlayed-pipelines-billions
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.