In December, a new terminal in the Port of Beaumont [Texas] welcomed its first customer: a train carrying 43,000 barrels of crude oil from Colorado. Workers at the terminal, the Jefferson Transload Railport, transferred the crude to a barge, which traveled down the Neches River to a nearby refinery.
As shale fields scattered across the Midwest and West Texas produce millions of barrels of crude oil, energy companies are finding the national pipeline network insufficient to transport their output. Railroads are increasingly picking up the slack, and Jefferson Energy Companies, based in The Woodlands, is one of several companies investing millions of dollars to help transport crude by rail, a business that was nearly nonexistent just five years ago. [The NYT could add that the Bakken laboratory was pretty much solely responsible; Obama's dithering on the Keystone XL probably had almost as much to do with the new business, in retrospect.]
“We never thought we competed with pipeline until four years ago when we moved our first unit train of crude by rail,” Dean Wise, a vice president for BNSF Railway, based in Fort Worth, said at a rail conference in January. “Now BNSF is moving eight trains a day.” (BNSF is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune.)Look at the numbers:
While most crude oil is still transported by pipelines, rail transport is gaining ground. According to the Association of American Railroads, the United States rail system transported 407,642 carloads of crude oil in 2013, up from 9,500 carloads in 2008.
The Port of Beaumont and Jefferson Energy developed the Jefferson Transload Railport as a public-private partnership, a Jefferson Energy spokesman, Mark Viator, said. Money for the project included $47 million borrowed through a federal bond program for areas affected by Hurricane Ike in 2008. While the terminal is currently receiving crude oil trains that have 60 to 80 cars, it is equipped to handle trains of up to 120 cars and to drain every car simultaneously, Mr. Viator said. [Like milking cows, I suppose.]
To the best of my knowledge there has been one Bakken-oil-CBR mishap in the United States since the engineer forgot to set his brakes in Canada back in July, 2013. It's very possible that there were more casualties in Ted's plunge over the bridge than CBR casualties in the US. Don't quote me on that; I could be wrong, and probably am. But considering that CBR accounted for less than 10,000 carloads in 2008 and that number has now grown to over 400,000 carloads, it's been about as mishap-free as one could hope. CBR has certainly been better executed in the United States than ObamaCare.“Everything that has been received so far in the Beaumont terminal has been from Colorado,” a spokesman for the Port of Beaumont, John Roby, said. “It’s mainly because rail is serving those areas that are not now served by pipelines.”
Considering the The New York Times doesn't want pipeline or rail, it's actually quite remarkable what the oil and gas industry has been able to achieve. Warren certainly bought BNSF at the right time.
I remember when I first started blogging about CBR, I was told by at least one reader that CBR was a passing fad, and that once enough pipeline was put in place, CBR would wither on the tracks.
Two things the reader missed: a) the flexibility of rail; and, b) the message sent by the President when he dithered on the Keystone XL -- the president's message: "in addition to my war on coal, I will do what I can to slow the oil and gas industry."