Western Railroad Discussion > Utah Railway Oil trains update

There seems to be no crude transloading currently going on at Martin. However there are 40 tanks at WildCat this may be the new loading location........

I stopped by the Utah Ry yard at Martin on May 24, saw a crude oil tank truck unloading, drove up to the yard and was able to talk to the supervisor of the unloading operation. He said that they were loading around 40,000 barrels a month of yellow crude from the Altamont-Bluebell field in the Uintah Basin. That may sound like a lot of oil, but it only amounts to an average of about 7 tank truck loads a day. The Utah Ry takes the oil to Provo and interchanges it to the Union Pacific who takes it to Louisiana. There are two varieties of crude produced in the Basin: yellow wax and black wax. These crudes have a very high wax content and a very high pour point. You have to keep them hot or they set up like shoe polish. The tank cars are insulated and equipped with steam coils to reheat the oil if it solidifies prior to unloading. He informed me of another crude loadout on the Utah Ry. This second one is at Wildcat siding, where some of the Utah Ry coal trains load. He said it was a very small operation and only accepted black wax oil. A third rail transport operation has also recently started up. Newfield Exploration has begun trucking black wax 175 miles from the Roosevelt, Utah area to Ogden, Utah. The crude is then taken by the Union Pacific to Canada, of all places, for refining. Their first train of crude left Ogden the week prior to May 24. All of this is due to several factors. Limited refining capacity due to a couple of Salt Lake City refineries being shut down for periodic maintenance and some new construction to increase capacity and increasing production in the Uintah Basin that is larger than the local refining capacity for this unusual waxy crude. Some of the local producers, Newfield, Berry Petroleum, Crescent Point and others have hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude stored in tanks on their leases.

Dick
Roosevelt, Utah



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/05/13 19:52 by 2ebright.

Maybe they are staging them at Wildcat? I counted 40 cars...

7 cars a day could load a 70 car unit train every ten days.... Not bad for a start.

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Hey, 2ebright - Are things still pretty much the same on the Deseret and with Utah Railway coal? A fellow from Denver wants me to give him a tour, and last time I showed up at Helper, I got skunked by UR - no train at all, and before you could usually count on an empty going up the hill daily somewhere around Amtrak No. 6's time. Is that still the case, or have they slowed down? Is Deseret running 2 or 3 turns a day? === === = === JLH

Is this "waxey" oil the only type of oil that comes out of Utah? Is this the oil that the refineries in Salt Lake use? Is so, I suppose it's good for more than just chewing gum? I remember back in the early 80's when Chevron used to run a unit oil train from the Salt lake refinery to northern California. IIRC, the contract moved periodically between the UP and DRGW/SP.

"Is this "waxey" oil the only type of oil that comes out of Utah? Is this the oil that the refineries in Salt Lake use? Is so, I suppose it's good for more than just chewing gum? I remember back in the early 80's when Chevron used to run a unit oil train from the Salt lake refinery to northern California. IIRC, the contract moved periodically between the UP and DRGW/SP."

I’m not really an oil refining guy, rather my experience is in geology, reservoirs and well completions. That being said, I will try to answer your questions. No, not all of Utah’s oil is waxy. Just that which comes from the Uintah Basin, but that is by far the biggest producing area in Utah. The oil fields in the Overthrust Belt near Evanston, Wyoming and the Paradox Basin fields in the Four Corners area of Utah produce a more non-waxy type of crude. The refineries in Salt Lake City (there are 5 of them) use a mix of oil; waxy crude from the basin and a lot of more conventional, sweeter, crude from the Rangely Field in Colorado, some from the Overthrust Belt fields near Evanston, Wyoming and also some Canadian crude, I think. But the critical part so far as refining is concerned is that the refinery has to be designed and equipped to handle the waxy crude. The waxy crude is, indeed, good for more than chewing gum. I have been told that it is a very good refinery feedstock that results in a high yield of gasoline and diesel. Railroad content; the increasing oil production from Utah's Uintah Basin is creating a huge transportation problem. It is roughly 150 miles from the basin oil fields to Salt Lake City. There is only limited pipeline capacity and no good rail alternative. Even though is requires a difficult truck haul over a 9100' mountain pass, a small, but growing, rail alternative has begun and is apparently growing.

Dick
Roosevelt, Utah

jc76 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Maybe they are staging them at Wildcat? I counted
> 40 cars...
>
> 7 cars a day could load a 70 car unit train every
> ten days.... Not bad for a start.

7 tank truck loads, not 7 railcars. 40,000 barrels is only half of the normal 75 to 85,000 barrel volume of a unit train, so 7 truckloads a day to make 40,000 barrels a month sounds about right.


SH