It was never going to be an anniversary to celebrate.
But what nobody needed was an added reminder of the tragic events on July 6, 2013, however small.
Almost a year to the day after the derailment of crude tankers at Lac-Megantic, Quebec, that killed 47 people and destroyed 100 businesses and homes, several crude tankers on a Canadian National Railway, CN, train left the tracks northwest of Edmonton.
Five cars on the train derailed 10 miles east of the town of Whitecourt, with emergency services and environment teams sent to the site.
CN said the accident site was secured without any leaks. The cause of the derailment is under investigation.
What the event hammered home was the danger of using rail to move crude at a time when new pipelines are stalled across North America.
A Vancouver-based shareholder advocacy group issued a report on July 2 examining corporate governance oversight of rail safety in light of the Lac-Megantic tragedy.
What the Shareholder Association for Research and Education, Share, concluded was that many companies were not dealing with the risks at the board level.
It looked at 15 of the companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange index that are involved in shipping crude - including CN and Canadian Pacific Railway, plus 13 energy companies that use rail to move their products and concluded that only 46 percent specifically identified rail as a possible material risk facing those companies as part of their reporting to shareholders.
Share suggested that a possible way to rebalance corporate priorities would be to include safety performance as one of the factors used in evaluating the annual performance of chief executive officers.
But it said only 40 percent of the companies it examined publicly disclose the specific safety measures they enforce and none sets actual safety targets that CEOs are expected to meet to earn bonuses.
Share said 47 percent of the companies include some information about how much weight is attached to safety factors in setting bonuses.
“For shareholders to know what risks are being prioritized and how strong the incentives are for management to address them, most extensive disclosure of compensation practices is in order,” the report said.
Trains routed through urban areas
Meanwhile, in the United States, the Associated Press reported that dozens of trains hauling volatile crude shipments from the Northern Plains pass through Illinois and the Midwest every week, with up to 19 reaching Washington state.
BNSF Railway disclosed it moves as many as 27 trains a week through Chicago’s Cook County and 13 through King County, which includes Seattle.
The routing of trains through urban areas has been a pivotal issue since Lac-Megantic and a series of other fiery derailments, including North Dakota, Virginia, Alabama and New Brunswick, most of them involving light sweet crude from the Bakken formation.
The AP said the railroads tried to prevent the release of information it sought, citing security reasons, but the Federal Railroad Administration said that information was not sensitive.
However, California, New Jersey, Minnesota and Colorado have agreed to requests from BNSF, CSX and Union Pacific to keep a lid on the information, while state officials in North Dakota, New York and Wisconsin said they had not decided whether releasing the information would violate state open-records laws.
U.S. crude-by-rail shipments exceeded 110,000 carloads in the first quarter of 2014, the Association of American Railroads reported - record levels which are being paralleled in Canada, where the use of rail is a major element of the debate over the use of trains to carry crude during the protracted and heated debate over new pipelines.
Thousands of trucks, railcars
In its own discussion of pipeline alternatives, Kinder Morgan has noted that member companies of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association estimate 15,000 trucks and 5,000 railcars are used daily to move crude oil and petroleum products in Canada.
The company said its existing 300,000 barrels per day Trans Mountain pipeline from the Alberta oil sands to the Pacific Coast in British Columbia and Washington state moves the daily equivalent of 1,400 trucks and 441 railcars, figures that would triple if the Trans Mountain expansion is approved.
Glen Hodgson, senior vice president and chief economist at the Conference Board of Canada, wrote the Globe and Mail that if U.S. oil production increases to 11 million bpd by 2020 rail will become the “default option” if regulatory and political delays continue to present a barrier to pipelines.
He said the bottom line is that “timely approval” of Keystone XL is important and, if U.S. production continues to reduce America’s reliance on imports over the coming decade, Canada will be hard-pressed to handle demands unless it develops an energy delivery strategy.
