Reducing Flammability for Bakken Crude Oil for Train Transport - Yr 5

The goal of this project is to improve fire safety for hydrocarbon-based liquid fuels and fuel components and precursors by developing simple and inexpensive additives. Transportation accidents can lead to devastating fires and loss of life and property, as well as significant environmental damage. Finding and developing additives that decrease the chance and severity of fires will significantly improve transportation safety and can reduce cost by reducing the liability assumed by transportation operators.

The research objective is to identify and validate an additive or group of additives that reduce the risk and/or the severity of fires for hydrocarbon-based liquid fuels. This includes both processed fuels like diesel and kerosene and pre-processed components like crude oil and ethanol. Of particular interest in year 5 of this project is to take effective additives identified in years 1 to 4 and to improve their suspension characteristics so that they can stay active in the liquid for 90 to 120 days, the reasonable lifetime of fuel.

Use of the additives identified in this research will lead to reduction in the chance of fires by 10% to 20% and a reduction in the severity of fires that do occur of 15% to 25%. In practical terms, a low speed train derailment carrying crude oil is much less likely to start a fire, and a high speed derailment is likely to result in fewer train cars rupturing and burning due to the derailment. This is a significant benefit when the amount of crude oil shipped by rail is very large and increasing.

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