Posted on 08/28/2014 5:13:33 AM PDT by thackney
If you’re stuck at a railroad crossing or trapped on a delayed Amtrak train, you might blame it on the US oil boom.
US oil production is the highest in decades, and more and more crude is traveling by train. That is slowing shipments of grains, gravel, and even coal, as commodities and a resurgent oil industry compete for a finite amount of US rail. More oil pipelines could help ease the freight bottleneck, but those take time to build and have become controversial topics in the debate over the future of US energy.
In the meantime, firms are taking to the rails to get the country’s newfound oil wealth to market…
The glut of oil trains is even pushing other fossil fuels out of the market, with sparse coal shipments…
Today, rail carries more than 11 percent of US oil. That’s a huge jump from five years ago, when trains transported less than 1 percent of domestic oil…
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Plus, pipelines would cut into the profit margin being enjoyed by Ubama BFF Warren Buffett on whose rail lines a lot, if not most, of this oil is being transported.
Nothing against the profit motive but let's get all the reasons for the delays out there.
We met a couple last week who were intending to take Amtrak’s northern route as a vacation. They got as far as Chicago. They were bussed up to Milwaukee and given airplane tickets to get them home to Seattle because of the rail congestion.
I have to wonder how many people ride AMTRAK for actual commuting purposes? (like getting from point A to B for other than vacation/pleasure)
In the Northeast, it is a more common form of travel.
I used to work in Philadelphia. There were folks living in three different states working in my office. We were across the bridge from the 30th street rail station.
How do you exacerbate a nonexistent problem?
Good old Obama always setting up these straw man obstacles to put off decisions he does not want to make. Not making a decisions is always better for him. Once he make a decision you are open to criticism. Before you make a decision you can solicit contributions from all sides. After you make a decision the contributions dry up.
We had Amtrack reservations from Seattle to Syracuse that were cancelled by e mail 4 days in advance. There was a mud slide in North Dakota. We were given new reservations 3 days later than the original.
On arrival in Seattle we were told that while we had reservations there was a detour around the track outage that would add 5 hours to the journey. Since Amtrack is always at least 5 hours behind schedule, that would mean a 10 hour delay and likely miss of the train leaving Chicago for Syracuse. That would mean arriving in Chicago at 11:00 at night with no place to go to spend the time till the train left the following night assuming they could book us on that train.
The clerk gave up explaining and called her supervisor who under his breath asked if we wanted a refund. The train cost more than air fare so we got the refund and booked a red eye to Syracuse on Delta via Atlanta.
The trans Canada legs of our rail trip was great. The Amtrack leg never occurred. Our experiment of travel using all public means failed on the Train across America because although theoretically there, in practice it is not.
On arrival at the Syracuse airport, we got in our trusty Sprinter van back and hit I 81 for a direct shot home.
If only there were some other way to transport oil in this country besides rail cars...
...some sort of linearly aligned... I don’t know.. hollow TUBE, manufactured with a circular cross-section from some kind of impermeable material and installed beneath the ground...
...or something...
Visited Glacier NP a while back.
BNSF sure is hauling a whole lot of black tank cars across Montana. Many of the trains were multiple locomotives with nothing but tanks behind them.
Gee, if only there was a way to transport oil other than trains.
I personally can’t wait until driver-less cars are allowed on the interstates. That will be a fantastically flexible way to travel.
Grain Piles Up, Waiting for a Ride, as Trains Move North Dakota Oil
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/us/grain-piles-up-waiting-for-a-ride-as-trains-move-north-dakota-oil.html?_r=0
The furious pace of energy exploration in North Dakota is creating a crisis for farmers whose grain shipments have been held up by a vast new movement of oil by rail, leading to millions of dollars in agricultural losses and slower production for breakfast cereal giants like General Mills.
The backlog is only going to get worse, farmers said, as they prepared this week for what is expected to be a record crop of wheat and soybeans.
“If we can’t get this stuff out soon, a lot of it is simply going to go on the ground and rot,” said Bill Hejl, who grows soybeans, wheat and sugar beets in the town of Casselton, about 20 miles west of here.
Although the energy boom in North Dakota has led to a 2.8 percent unemployment rate, the lowest in the nation, the downside has been harder times for farmers who have long been mainstays of the state’s economy. Agriculture was North Dakota’s No. 1 industry for decades, representing a quarter of its economic base, but recent statistics show that oil and gas have become the biggest contributors to the state’s gross domestic product....
But reports the railroads filed with the federal government show that for the week that ended Aug. 22, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway — North Dakota’s largest railroad, owned by the billionaire Warren E. Buffett — had a backlog of 1,336 rail cars waiting to ship grain and other products. Another railroad, Canadian Pacific, had a backlog of nearly 1,000 cars.
excerpted for NY Times
I’ve tried to find the thread where we recently discussed the rail delays caused by oil trains. I was wrong about how it has impacted other deliveries.
Likewise, carloadings for "Petroleum and Petroleum Products" (of which 1267 placarded cars are only a fraction thereof) are up 10.0% to an average count for 2014 of 14,909 cars/week.
Every single commodity category is showing year on year growth, even that evil Gore-bull warming coal is up, albeit marginally.
Build a pipeline and you can move one commodity from one point to another point. Brilliant. Freight railroads, big and small, which are owned by shareholders and ran as a Capitalist concern, are making capacity enhancements investing heavily in their infrastructure. Of course some of this money is through government grants, but a majority of the expansion related to the energy boom is being paid for by Capitalists, as they CAN NOT WAIT for some grant to be approved by some obstructionist government bureaucrat when there is SH!TLOADS OF MONEY to be made RIGHT NOW.
Rail can move anything, anywhere... well except people because there is NO WAY TO EVER MAKE A PROFIT DOING SO. The Eisenhower Interstate System and Municipal Airports, initially funded by a 15% tax on rail passenger tickets, have effectively killed that, a long time ago... and here taxpayers keep paying to keep ALL passenger transportation running as a result. Epic Fail.
Milton Friedman really had it right. The best, most "sustainable", most "natural", and self-regulating system is Capitalism. True prosperity is the direct result of Capitalism.
Anyways, they can build Keystone XL... carloadings for CBR will still continue to expand as it is the best method to get the commodity to the market... from anywhere in the nation, to anywhere in the nation.
</WillieGreenRant>
The catch is for oil, it is typically sold in long term contracts. The refinery doesn't move and the oil field doesn't move around. A pipeline delivers for a fraction of the cost and is the reason most oil moves that way.
This is funny. Liberal environmentalist wackos blocking socialized Amtrak.
“For his part, President Obama has said he will only approve the Keystone XL pipeline – which would help alleviate the Bakken bottleneck – if it does not “significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.”
In other words it will not be built as long as he is president.
“If you’re stuck at a railroad crossing or trapped on a delayed Amtrak train, you might blame it on the US oil boom”
Nope. You can blame DemoFascist Obama and his latter day railroad robber baron crony billionaire Warren Buffet for impeding the construction of new underground oil pipelines.
Oil is only ~5% of total train carloads moved each week in the US.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3198100/posts
Okay.
What does that have to do with whether there are other ways to transport it?
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