It Started When President Obama Killed The Keystone XL -- September 13, 2014

A must-read story on the railcar backlog affecting many industries across the US. Kitco.com is reporting:

On Friday, officials at Minnesota iron ore mines said they can't get all their finished taconite pellets to market because of a shortage of rail service apparently spurred by the huge increase in the amount of oil moving by rail.

Taconite industry officials confirmed Friday that they are making taconite faster than they can move it by rail, with millions tons of pellets stockpiled and waiting for trains.
The shortage of rail service is an unintended consequence of a huge increase in demand to ship crude oil by rail. Railroads now are shipping more than 15,000 train carloads of petroleum products each week, more than double the amount in 2010. Oil shipments from North Dakota are competing for rail space with many other products nationally, but especially in the Upper Midwest.

Cliffs Natural Resources, which operates three taconite plants in Minnesota and one in Michigan, said Friday its operations "are among a number of industrial facilities that have been have been significantly affected by the national logjam of rail service in the United States."

In a statement to the News Tribune, Cliffs said the rail backlog "creates substantial and irreversible negative consequences" because the shipping season on the Great Lakes is finite, closing in early January for more than two months. If Cliffs can't get its pellets to Lake Superior and shipped out by ore boat by then, its steelmaking customers in the eastern U.S. won't get the raw material they need to make it through winter. 

And much, much more at the link.

It won't make any difference this year, but the activists in Minnesota continue to derail new pipeline routes. Pun intended. The PUC is unable to make a decision. At least that's how it appears to me, and I'm sure I'm wrong. Whatever. Meanwhile, the Nebraskans seem to have an even bigger circus sorting out the Keystone.

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Starting with the killing of the Keystone XL, this has morphed from a Greek tragedy to a Bollywood comedy. Or perhaps vice versa depending which side of the tracks you are on. Pun intended.

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Pullman Strike of 1894. Perhaps some lessons there.

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A huge "thank you" to a reader for sending me the link to this story.