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

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 controversial step is designed to abrogate the damage North Dakota crude oil – 70 percent of which is transported via rail – can cause during derailments. In the absence of concrete regulations from the U.S. Department of Transportation, North Dakota’s new rules become the de facto national standard on the treatment of crude before tankcar loading. 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...more