Growing up on a farm, I had some experience handling barrels of crude oil, which I never found to be particularly flammable, and certainly not explosive. So I had been puzzled by those derailed oil trains that were going off like nuclear bombs, complete with the mushroom cloud.
Turns out I wasn't the only one puzzled. A reporter from the Wall Street Journal started to look into it and, and at some point, so did Rachel Maddow.
Now I love Rachel, but I always get irritated when she seems to repeat the facts she is reporting over and over, and rerun the graphics accompanying her commentary over and over. And the commercials, my God, the commercials (the Simpsons have even parodied the commercials). Thank God for TiVO.
But I am almost always astonished that at some point in her show she comes to the reveal: information that I not only did not know, I never saw coming.
Go below the fold for a case in point: last night’s show.
In typical lead-in fashion, Rachel started the show at a point that was both fascinating, and utterly irrelevant: the layout and font of the New York Times on a particular day in 1903.
The segue to the oil trains was from a 1903 NYT story about a mountain top cave-in that buried a town to an oil train that derailed and exploded on that very town last week.
Rachel then showed clip after clip of exploding derailed oil trains carrying tar sands crude from Canada and the Bakken, which, initially, I thought, was just Rachel looking smugly at the camera with an “ain’t it awful" look.
Then, though, she went to Texas and reported on equipment used in refining Texas crude that isn’t used in refining Bakken crude: the stabilizer.
She then interviewed a reporter from the Wall Street Journal to explain the significance of the stabilizer.
Turns out, crude oil does not explode if you remove the “light ends” from the petroleum coming out of the ground. The light ends are elements of methane and natural gases that are the explosive elements in Bakken crude that are not removed because the Bakken does not use stabilizers.
In short, Bakken is shipped in oil trains like rolling bombs, while Texas crude oil trains are not.
Turns out, further, that the North Dakota government agency regulating the Bakken oil fields considered, but did not immediately require, the use of stabilizers for pre-shipped Bakken crude because the oil producers complained that they had no place to store or ship the natural gas elements that would be removed by the stabilizer equipment. Solution: put the Bakken crude on the trains, cross your fingers, ship it all over the country and, if it makes it to a refinery, remove the light ends there.
Now that, my friends, is journalism.
P.S. The Wall Street Journal Reporter has written a book about this. Unsurprisingly, the North Dakota Petroleum Council seems to dispute his analysis. See http://www.northdakotaoilcan.com/...
4:36 PM PT: I carelessly conflated Canadian tar sands crude with Bakken Crude. Mar Eng clarified the difference in the comments. (Don't you just love the Kos peer-review proccess?).