The Transportation Department sent to the White House a final rule for strengthening safety standards for rail cars that carry crude oil, setting up a lobbying fight to influence the shape of the regulations.
The Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration standards are designed to address safety concerns arising from an surge in oil riding the rails to get to refineries. A series of derailments in the United States that followed a July 2013 oil train accident in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, that killed 47 people heightened awareness and federal action.
Details of the proposal sent Thursday to the White House Office of Management and Budget weren’t revealed. It floated a range of options regarding speed limits, tank thickness and braking technology in its July draft rule.
Much of the crude has come from the pipeline-constrained Bakken shale region in North Dakota and Montana, which is now pumping more than 1 million barrels of oil per day thanks to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, technology. Carloads of that crude class have jumped from 10,800 per day in 2009 to more than 400,000 in 2013.
Derailments rose as the amount of crude getting to market by train increased exponentially. An NBC News analysis of PHMSA data found a record 141 “unintentional releases” last year, compared with an average of 25 between 1975 and 2012.
The proposed rule called for retiring or retrofitting a number of legacy tankers. It also proposed stricter classification standards for oil because federal regulators are concerned that Bakken crude is more flammable than other varieties.
Industry has resisted the classification standards for Bakken crude, saying it’s no more explosive than any other type of crude. And while the oil and gas industry has largely agreed with moving on from the legacy trains, railcar makers say the timeline DOT floated for replacing older models is too aggressive. Under the draft rule, industry would have until October 2017 to make more than 20,000 older tankers safer in order to ship flammable crude.
