(Source: DeSmog Blog, May 2, 2018)
NEW YORK — The oil industry learned an important lesson from its rush to move by train the highly flammable oil drilled in North Dakota’s Bakken Shale. The lesson wasn’t that those oil trains were unsafe and even dubbed “bomb trains” by rail workers (although they were). The lesson wasn’t that their derailments caused several major oil spills in North America as well as the tragic accident in Lac-Mégantic, Canada, which killed 47 people and leveled the downtown area (although they did). No, what the oil industry learned from this experience was that when it doesn’t have adequate pipeline capacity, its companies can still make money moving flammable petroleum products by rail, despite the well-documented risks outlined above. And the industry is now taking the same steps to move refined petroleum products — including gasoline — to Mexico by rail.
Full story: DeSmog Blog