So… I want to tell you a story… a terrible, terrible story!
Imagine… You are laying in your new hammock out on the back deck. It is a beautiful sunny summer evening, just a few white fluffy clouds in an otherwise azure sky. The birds are chirping and flitting back and forth from one cattail to another in the marsh just beyond your fence-line.
Your dog is bounding back and forth between a small ball and a toad, unsure which is more entertaining. The drink in your hand is cold and refreshing. You can hear the kids playing just inside the open patio door… something about Harry Potter. Life is good.
Just as you are beginning to doze off to the rhythmic sound of the massive train rolling through in the background, maybe a ¼ mile from your home, you are jolted from this reverie by the screech of metal wheels grinding against metal tracks… followed by a thundering series of almost unimaginably deep impacts. “Wham! Thump! Groan! Crash! Pop!”
The ground underneath you trembles and then lurches with the force of the explosion that follows, joined only a moment later by a shower of glass as your windows all blow out from resultant air blast.
Your head is aching and feels thick. Your vision won’t work quite right.
“Jesus! The children!” Covered in glass, half-deaf from the blast and bleeding from seemingly everywhere, you pick yourself up and run for the house. In your terror you hardly even notice your bare feet being filleted by the shards that now cover your once Utopian backyard paradise. You run for the house. Please let them be OK!
O.K. As a favor, I won’t even bother upsetting you with the pitch black skies and literal rain of fire that is coming within the next few moments. …or the images of what happens to your poor beagle as she tries to understand why her fur is on fire. I think you get the point.
Welcome, my friends, to my actual back yard.
Well, the one that could result in the event that what has already happened far too many times in recent years, were to happen right along the very tracks that run near my home… and the homes of almost 10% of our nation’s citizens.
The pin in the map above is my home. The red zone is where everyone likely dies. Yellow means you only get injured. I do not envy my neighbors to the right.
Welcome to the rolling hell that is the ‘bomb train’.
So, are we talking about terrorism here? No. Actually, capitalism.
We are talking about the terrible human and environmental cost of energy independence without appropriate safety standards. …without crude oil trains that won’t explode and kill everyone within a quarter mile of their domain.
I know, dramatic. …but not unthinkable. Barely even unlikely.
The back-story:
The current fleet of crude oil tanker cars in service within the U.S. and Canada are out of date and have proven to be unsafe to an almost unimaginable level.
This is costing lives, causing environmental disasters, and costing the U.S. oil industry a fortune cleaning up the mess, paying $100M+ fines and compensating the victims, if not the dead.
In 2008, when there were only roughly 9,500 tanker carloads transported across America by rail, this was of fairly low concern to both citizens and law-makers.
However, due to the massive boom in shale oil production within the U.S., by 2014 that number had sky-rocketed to over 500,000 carloads.
To the industry’s credit, the current accident rate is less than 0.002%.
Sounds great until you realize that is up to 10 per year!
TEN potential scenes just like the one above.
…or this one…
The problem is that tank cars carrying highly volatile crude oil (especially crude from shale production, due to the high levels of dissolved gasses present) have a nasty tendency to explode into flames when they derail.
This problem is compounded by the fact that the majority of the rail lines along which crude oil shipments travel pass through heavily populated areas and wind along rivers (as rivers form a natural causeway through mountains and other natural obstructions).
This puts both people and the environment in harm’s way.
Is this really just a thinly veiled cautionary tale designed to get you to stop driving your massive SUV or ridiculous German sports sedan?
HELL NO. I don’t feel like giving up either of mine, and I live IN the blast zone!
This is about an industry that is under government mandate in both the U.S. and Canada to get this problem under control in the next five years … and none of their current solutions will even come close.
This is simple.
We at Knano have the solution. We can make this stop.
…and we can save the oil industry hundreds of millions of dollars and save countless lives, homes and our environment.
We can do this cheaper and vastly more effectively than current (or even proposed next-gen) methods and technologies.
We can turn existing nightmare trains into vastly safer containment vessels that, mile for mile traveled, will still likely crash 0.002% of the time – but with far less disastrous consequences.
No puncture = no spill = no burn = no explosion.
…and all for less than $10,000 per train car. A pittance that even those responsible for picking up the tab are anxious to pay.