Top BNSF rail executive says safer tanker car can greatly lower risk of oil-by-rail disasters

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http://www.thenewstribune.com/2014/08/27/3349659/top-bnsf-rail-executive-says-safer.html?sp=/99/296/331/326/

Top BNSF rail executive says safer tanker car can greatly lower risk of oil-by-rail disasters
By Brad Shannon
Staff writer
August 27, 2014

Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway’s executive chairman Matthew Rose says his company wants safer ways to haul volatile oil by rail from the Bakken fields of North Dakota to refineries and terminals in Washington and around the country that have seen rapidly increasing traffic since 2011.

BNSF, the largest railroad hauler of oil in the U.S., has pledged to buy 5,000 future oil tank cars, which don’t yet exist. But prototypes of the third-generation tanker have been built, and await federal approval before being mass produced and deployed on a large scale, Rose said in an interview in Seattle this week.

"At the end of the day what we are try to do of course is improve the safety, reduce the probability of release,” Rose said. “When we look at probability of releases in an accident, it is literally like 80 percent safer (using) the next generation tank car than it is with the original (DOT)-111 tank car. So these are significant reductions .. in what is already a very, very safe railroad.”

He also said his company plans to offer incentives such as lower hauling rates for oil shippers that use the new tank car. Details of that rate system are just being worked out but Rose said companies that want to ship the more volatile Bakken crude oil produced by “fracking” in North Dakota would need to use the better rail cars or pay a higher rate.