California Gov. Jerry Brown signed bills requiring companies to make new disclosures about train shipments of crude oil through the most populous U.S. state and about water used in energy production.
The transport law mandates that carriers release information about the movement and characteristics of crude oil and other hazardous materials to state and local agencies, so they can prepare emergency responses in case of accidents.
Crude-oil shipments by rail are growing to handle oil extracted from U.S. shale formations with limited access to pipelines. U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx has called for new regulations to improve crude-by-rail safety by the end of the year after accidents including a Quebec derailment in July 2013 that killed 47 people.
“The risk of catastrophic injury to life and property by rail accident has grown dramatically,” said Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, a Sacramento Democrat who authored the bill. “State and local emergency response agencies face new challenges when dealing with this amount of hyper-flammable crude oil. Now our emergency response agencies will have the information they need about crude oil cargo in order to prepare and protect our communities and minimize any damage from an accident.”
A second bill requires oil producers to provide the state with more information about water used in processes such as water flooding and steam injection, which are designed to increase the flow of thicker oil from the ground.
In 2013, enhanced oil recovery operations used more than 80 billion gallons of water in California, the equivalent amount used by about 500,000 households and more than 800 times the amount used for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, according to Sen.Fran Pavley, a Democrat and the author of the bill.
The effect of this use on domestic and agricultural water supplies isn’t known because oil companies aren’t required to disclose details about their water use, she said in statement.