Williston Oil Shipping Through Area
Williston, North Dakota is a small city of 15,000 over 1,800 miles away from Palisades. We don’t share much in common with this community aside from huge quantities of crude oil passing through our communities daily. Williston has been ground zero for the American oil boom brought on by the controversial method of hydraulic fracturing, more popularly known as “fracking.” This boom has made America the world’s largest oil producer by volume. In 2015, the North Dakota oil fi elds fl ooded the market with one million barrels a day; that equates to over 50 million gallons every 24 hours.
On any given day, 400,000 barrels of Bakken crude can arrive in Albany, NY from North Dakota through a convoluted rail route to minimize elevation change. Once in Albany the crude continues its journey by rail in outdated DOT-111 tanker cars on CSX’s River Subdivision Line from Albany to Linden, NJ, cutting though sections of Orangetown as it snakes its way down along the Hudson River. Crude is also loaded onto tankers and barges in the Hudson River at the Port of Albany bound for ports on the east coast of North America, passing only within a few hundred yards from the shoreline of Palisades. From there it is refined into gasoline, propane and plastics.
The Bakken shale formation encompasses over 200,000 square miles, mostly in North Dakota, with estimates of 3 to 4 billion barrels of recoverable oil inside rock using new methods such as horizontal drilling and multi-stage fracturing. This hydrogen-heavy and carbon-light oil is more volatile than the gasoline we put into our cars. Combined with a lack of infrastructure for transporting the oil to market, this has created the ideal scenario for disaster. Because an immature pipeline system only has a capacity to handle a fraction of the daily output, oil companies have resorted to shipping the remote crude via the costly and dangerous method of rail.
During the summer of 2013, a train carrying 72 tanker cars of Bakken crude exploded, destroying Lac-Mégantic, Quebec and killing 47 people in the process. That same year train derailments, also carrying Bakken crude, caused explosions in Alabama and North Dakota. Tanker ships on the Hudson River carrying Bakken oil have had accidents, including spills and groundings. In 2012, the Stena Primorsk, a UK flagged double hulled, open ocean oil tanker carrying 279,000 barrels of Bakken oil, ran aground on its maiden voyage only a few miles down river from the port of Albany across from Stuyvesant, NY. Listing heavily on the port side and turning uncontrollably sideways in a river not much wider than the ship is long, luckily only the outer hull was pierced, saving the Hudson River and its communities from a disaster with unfathomable consequences.
With current prices continuing to fall below $30 a barrel, the short-term future of crude production from the Bakken formation is uncertain. Many wells need a minimum price of at least $50-$60 a barrel to remain profitable. A unique characteristic of this type of oil extraction is the ability to stop and restart a well without drastically affecting the output. Hopefully the currently depressed oil prices will slow down production enough to give the transportation infrastructure a chance to catch up and leave communities across the country safer by eliminating the stop gap methods used to get this necessary resource from remote North Dakota to where it is used.