For several months long trains of rail
cars full of crude oil can be seen inching along, or stopped altogther, beside I-787
in downtown Albany. Other tankers fill the rail yards off I-90 not far from the
SUNY campus. All are waiting to offload
into the tank farm at the Port of Albany for transfer onto barges for transport
down the Hudson River to the New York harbor, and from there to Philadelphia and other East Coast refineries. There is simply so much oil pouring through Albany these days that the limited number of holding
tanks, and the relatively small size of the river-going tankers, can just
barely manage it.
The
trains, up to 80 tankers each, originate in the growing Bakken oil fields of Dakota
and Montana and have traveled over a series of states and down the old NY
Central tracks through the Mohawk Valley without attracting much notice – in
stark contrast to the huge political and public relations battle over the Keystone
XL pipeline from Canada into Texas.
In “Rail It On Over To Albany – Moving Bakken East,” energy
consultant Rusty Braziel describes the vast infrastructure in North Dakota sending
out the Bakken oil across the country. Buckeye and Global
Partners, the two companies active at the port, have maintained a very low profile
about their role in transporting the crude from the Bakken oil fields of North
Dakota and Montana. A couple of workers from the port told me recently that so
few local jobs have been produced that the companies see no value in
publicizing their heavy investment in the Port.
According to an October
27 article by Brian Nearing in the AlbanyTimes Union, neither the state Department of Environmental Conservation nor
the Coast Guard have seen a need to update plans for containing any possible
oil spill resulting from the increased traffic. And these kind of shipments are
unprecedented in this area, according to port manager Richard Hendrick, who
said,” "I am not aware that a drop of crude was ever shipped out of the
port until the Bakken oil showed up this year.” Nearing goes on to write:
"Between
Houston-based Buckeye Partners and Global Partners, located in Waltham, Mass.,
up to 395,000 barrels of oil a day could come into Albany on rail cars, and
then move 150 miles down the river on tankers and barges to the Atlantic. That
is nearly 16.6 million gallons of oil a day, nearly half the potential output
of a massive field thousands of miles away that is estimated to hold more than
two billion barrels of oil, or even more, making it one of the largest oil
reserves in the country. Locked in shale rock formations, the oil became
reachable only after new rock-fracturing drilling technology was developed in
2008."
As with so many
environmental issues, public reactions are intensely local, no matter what the
global effects. Drilling for natural gas is the issue in New York, not the oil
that is passing quietly through our state – even though the same hydraulic fracturing technology produces both
kinds of fossil fuel. The difference, of course, is that the profits and
problems of potentially rich Marcellus shale gas fields under much of this
state are right in front of us– and the
oil is being pumped far way.
Andrew Cuomo, who has
long held the line on fracking for natural gas in this state, appears to be
moving toward approval. In response, A
protest rally at the State Capitol has been called by New Yorkers Against Fracking for January 9,
to coincide with the Governor’s State of the State message – but thus far there’s
no public anxiety over the risk of oil tankers on the Hudson
But maybe there should be, given the casualness with which state and federal authorities have reacted to the millions of gallons of crude oil passing through our region. After all, in 1989 a tiny crack in the hull of
one tanker bringing oil upriver released a mere thousand gallons near Coxsackie
and that took weeks to clean up.
And maybe, just maybe, it makes no sense to break up layers of shale hundreds of millions years old just to provide ourselves with a few more decades of fossil fuel that is wrecking the climate anyway.
And maybe, just maybe, it makes no sense to break up layers of shale hundreds of millions years old just to provide ourselves with a few more decades of fossil fuel that is wrecking the climate anyway.
And maybe we can learn something about long term survival
from the prehistoric Iroquois who built their village on this shale hill in Montgomery
County.
(Slightly different versions and of this post can be found on Fire Dog Lake and on Daily Kos.)
(Slightly different versions and of this post can be found on Fire Dog Lake and on Daily Kos.)
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