BILLINGS, Mont. — U.S. transportation officials rebuked the oil industry Friday for not giving up information regulators say they need to gauge the danger of moving crude by rail, after several accidents highlighted the explosive properties of fuel from the booming oil shale fields on the Northern Plains.
Department of Transportation officials said they have received only limited data on the characteristics of oil from the Bakken region of North Dakota and Montana, despite requests from Secretary Anthony Foxx more than two months ago.
“The overall and ongoing lack of cooperation is disappointing, slows progress and certainly raises concerns,” the agency said. “We still lack data we requested and that energy stakeholders agreed to produce within 30 days.”
The DOT said “a handful of individual companies” have offered the information.
Representatives from the American Petroleum Institute refuted the foot-dragging accusation.
“We’d like to know what information they’re not getting so we can give it to them,” said API spokesman Eric Wohlschlegel.
API president Jack Gerard said oil companies have been encouraged by the group to share what they know.
There have been at least four major accidents involving trains carrying crude from the Bakken since production began to boom in 2008. A derailment in July killed 47 people and torched much of downtown Lac-Megantic, Quebec.
The combustibility of the Lac-Megantic crude was comparable to gasoline’s, according to Canadian investigators.
Other explosions followed derailments of oil trains in Alabama, North Dakota and Oklahoma.
The string of accidents led regulators to warn emergency responders and the public in January that Bakken oil — a light, sweet crude with high amounts of natural gases and other volatile compounds — could be more dangerous than many conventional crudes.
Some crudes from other sites are similarly volatile. But the Bakken fuel is the first to move by rail in North America in modern times in such massive quantities. That’s exposed a new set of safety concerns, including a long-known defect that leaves tens of thousands of rail cars vulnerable to rupturing.
Mile-long oil trains can carry 3 million gallons of crude at a time. The 9,344 carloads delivered by major U.S. railroads in 2008 has surged to 434,000 carloads last year. The shipments go to refineries across the U.S. and Canada.
Unlike most manufactured hazardous materials, crude oil is not refined before being loaded onto trains. As a result, its properties vary greatly among shipments. Three companies were hit with proposed penalties totaling $93,000 in February for misclassifying oil from the Bakken as less dangerous.
The North Dakota Petroleum Council announced Friday it has contracted with an engineering consulting firm to study Bakken crude oil.
The council represents more than 500 companies operating in the Midwest and Rocky Mountains. Spokeswoman Tessa Sandstrom said oil will be sampled from 18 locations across the Williston Basin of North Dakota and Montana, which includes the Bakken.
Through API, the industry also has pledged to work with the government on new standards for testing the oil to make sure it’s handled properly when loaded on trains.
That process is expected to take several more months, driven in part by the volatility study.
Cynthia Quarterman, head of the Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration, testified before Congress as recently as late February that the industry had been working with regulators.
But there were signs the government’s patience was wearing thin in recent weeks. On March 10, Quarterman said the government could go it alone if necessary. She said regulators had close to 100 samples of oil, primarily from the Bakken, to do their own analyses.
