When the pipelines fill, the Bakken's crude rides the rails, and mile-long trains of black tank cars have become a familiar sight rolling east and west across the plains.
Before the pipelines caught up with the boom, the Bakken found another way to market: the railroad. Long unit trains of tank cars — a hundred and more, each brimming with crude — began rolling out of the oil patch toward refineries on both coasts, reviving the old truth that the plains have always moved their wealth by rail.
A Refinery on Wheels
Rail offered the producer flexibility the fixed pipe could not, reaching refineries a pipeline would never serve and following the best price wherever it led. But it raised safety questions too, for a derailment of crude is a serious matter, and the tank car fleet was steadily rebuilt to a sturdier standard in response.
From the almanac's reckoning:
- Unit trains of crude carry a hundred or more tank cars at once.
- Rail reaches coastal refineries that no pipeline serves.
- The tank-car fleet was rebuilt to a sturdier standard after safety concerns.
Pipe and rail now share the burden of carrying the Bakken out, each suited to different destinations and different times. The almanac notes that the black tank trains, whatever their troubles, kept the boom moving when nothing else could.
Elsewhere in the Almanac
The Roughneck's Trade on the Bakken Rig
On drilling floors across the west, the roughnecks work the pipe in long shifts through heat and cold, in one of the hardest and best-paid trades the plains have to offer.
Carbon Capture Comes to the Lignite Country
Hoping to square coal with a lower-carbon future, engineers on the Missouri Slope are pursuing projects to capture carbon dioxide and lock it deep beneath the plains.
Produced Water: The Oil Patch's Other Flood
For every barrel of Bakken oil comes salty water from deep in the earth, and managing that brine has become one of the oil patch's quietest and costliest challenges.