Posted on 10/01/2014 7:23:30 AM PDT by thackney
The oil and railroad industries are urging U.S. regulators to allow them as long as seven years to retrofit existing tank cars that transport highly volatile crude oil, a top oil industry official said Tuesday. The cars have ruptured and spilled oil during collisions, leading to intense fires...
...jointly asking the Department of Transportation for six to 12 months for rail tank car manufacturers to gear up to retrofit tens of thousands of cars and another three years to retrofit older cars....
...also want three years after that to retrofit newer tank cars manufactured since 2011, known as "1232 cars,"...
In July, the transportation department proposed that older cars be retrofitted within two years....
I wonder what the IRS depreciation table is for a railroad tanker?
My guess is its something like 14 years.
Just checked....guess what:
15 year working life.
7 Years to depreciate.
http://cs.thomsonreuters.com/ua/fixa/cs_us_en/ass_life_tbl/hid_help_asset_lives.htm
They want to be able to replace their entire fleet and take the depreciation.
Sounds reasonable to me. Long Rail tanker producers.
Good guess, depends on the method
Note that most of the cars are owned by the oil company and moved by the railroad.
http://cs.thomsonreuters.com/ua/fixa/cs_us_en/ass_life_tbl/hid_help_asset_lives.htm
00.25 Railroad Cars & Locomotives, except those owned by railroad transportation companies
Class Life (in years) 15
General Depreciation System 7 years
Alternative Depreciation System 15 years
Good thing we have Warren Buffett’s railroad to step in for those disastrously unsafe pipelines.
Manufacturing in the time frame (2 years) would be a big problem.
Finish the Keystone pipeline and forget the rail cars.
crony capitalism, pipeline prevention, JP Morgan
I know nothing about how these are built. But I would imagine big orders for marginal cars ( ones at their end of life point) would go up. Another industry around retrofitting should pop up for cars that are early in their life, and those sold —with a retrofit required for use.
There is no way the existing infrastructure could handle that.
But regulators rarely have had to “make” anything, so they would have no idea.
When the government set the original deadline for the digital TV transition there were not enough trained tower crews on the planet to possibly carry it out.
Most of the oil moved by rail in the US is not from Alberta.
Most of the oil to be moved by Keystone XL pipeline is Alberta heavy oil (bitumen).
While the pipeline would help, the rail issue is not tied to the Keystone XL specifically. Other pipelines are in progress for the area.
Just like the EPA mandating more cellulose ethanol be used than the industry was capable of producing. They fined them anyways.
Shameful. By the way, how much greenhouse gasses are created due to using rail versus pipelines. Where is AlGore.
Bet they could built the Keystone pipeline in less then seven years!
Agghh - you would have to remind me of a constant aggravation: The way broadcast digital TV signals drop out, instead of merely degrading in quality a bit, if the received signal weakens a bit, or some noise intrudes. I suppose the benefit is that it deters me from watching TV.
As it happens, I do know something about how these tank cars are built.
So I know that there are ALREADY special steel walls on each car, in addition to the walls of the tanks themselves, to prevent puncture of those tanks by the couplings of other cars, if a derailment should occur.
Of course, modifying the design of tank cars by adding additional steel walls and barriers will not prevent “stupidity”, such as:
(1) parking a train, loaded with LOW VOLATILITY oil, on an incline above a town — thereby setting up a hours-long war between the air-brakes restraining the train and gravity.
(2) failing to repair a mis-firing diesel engine in a locomotive on that train, as a result of which hot oil was sprayed out of its exhaust into the environment.
(3) failing to have an engineer watch the mis-firing diesel engine, even though continuous operation of that engine was required to provide power to the compressor that was needed to provide the air-pressure that made the air- brakes work.
(4) failure to anticipate the small fire, which was started outside the locomotive by the oil spray from the defective diesel engine.
(5) failure of the fire department to notice that, when they put out the small fire, the apparently logical action of turning the diesel engine “off” meant that the air-brake system would soon lose its pressure and that, as a result, the air-brakes restraining the train would soon fail.
(6) failure to locate the engineer who had left the train for his scheduled “break” (who might have known all these important facts) and failure to return him to his “duty”.
(7) locating storage tanks for the HIGH VOLATILITY LPG that was used in the town on a curve in the tracks right in the middle of that town, so that any derailment of any railcars (even lumber-cars and boxcars) could puncture those tanks and create an explosion that would be hot enough to ignite buildings and ignite any low-volatility fuel oil spilled on the ground.
But, hey, let’s never let a “crisis” go to waste...
The problem is that the companies who build new tankcars can’t build them fast enough. The railroad that I work for has an order in for 8000 new DOT spec. 23,000 gallon tank cars, and it’s going to be a long lead time on those.
And those new DOT regs apply to more than just tankcars for crude. What we haul as far as hazmat commodities goes, dwarfs the crude volume that we haul, and those will require the new tankcars also.
Thanks for that info on the orders. 8,000 from one company? Wow!
Who builds those cars?
“Lunacy. Absolute lunacy that crude is transported on a wholesale basis in about the most inefficient way possible. And all because of Obama who denies the pipelines.
Shameful. By the way, how much greenhouse gasses are created due to using rail versus pipelines. Where is AlGore.”
As someone pointed out, these oil loads do not originate in Alberta. A lot of it comes from the Dakotas. Also, these trains do not have to go to the same refinery. They can be dispatched to any refinery that can receive railcars, making this mode of transportation flexible.
It was the stupidity of a number of folks (as what happens in most disasters) that contributed to the massive fire. Sad but true.
BTW, the least efficient manner of transport would have been tanker trucks.
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