Big oil takes measures to fix crude transport, I think they read DU.

[CK_John]

My post from 3/10.

To me the untreated crude is of mix of high octane and bulk crude without any stabilizer. This is no secret to the railroads who are shipping this crude all over Canada and the US, it's just saving pennies and screw the environment and any poor jerk who happens to be in there way.

IMO, they are igniting and then are thrown off the tracks, not jumping the rails and catching on fire.....

North Dakota launches oil rules hoping to curb U.S. rail disasters

WILLISTON, N.D. (Reuters) - North Dakota will from Wednesday require the more-than 1.2 million barrels of crude extracted each day from the state's Bakken shale formation be run through machines that remove volatile gases linked to recent crude-by-rail disasters.

The new regulations require every single barrel of North Dakota crude to be filtered for ethane, propane and other natural gas liquids (NGLs), which are found naturally co-mingled with oil.

North Dakota crude contains a far-higher percentage of those gases than, for instance, crude extracted in Texas or Alaska, and that added volatility fueled a deadly derailment in Quebec in late 2013, as well as a string of successive disasters.

The goal would be to produce a barrel of Bakken crude with pressure of no more than 13.7 psi, similar to 13.5 psi for most automobile gasoline.

http://townhall.com/news/politics-elections/2015/04/01/north-dakota-launches-oil-rules-hoping-to-curb-us-rail-disasters-n1979293

[Vinca]

1. It's only a matter of time before one of the bomb trains goes off in a major city.

It's nice they're trying to reduce the risk. Now the damage will go back to being long and miserable over immediate and fatal.

[Scuba]

2. Wouldn't "Big Oil forced to take measures ..." be more accurate?

[MineralMan]

3. Many of those ND crude unit trains pass through the Twin Cities in MN.

Each is carrying over a million gallons of the stuff. Apparently, the news media here just figured that out and are running stories about the danger and risks. I started worrying about it some time ago, after driving past the huge rail yard in St. Paul. It was full of those tank cars.

It's only a matter of time until there is a disaster right in the heart of Minnesota's capital city.

Oh, yeah...those trains travel south right along the Mississippi River. The tracks follow the river from St. Paul to the Gulf of Mexico. Imagine a million gallons of volatile crude oil spilling into the river.

Pipelines are safer than trains, and mostly avoid cities.