Crude News

Oil by rail up 9 percent as U.S. oil production hits 8.5M barrels a day. That’s the headline in the August 28 article Nicholas Sakelaris wrote for the Dallas Business Journal. Behind the headline, our client BNSF’s central role in transporting crude from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota, which produces more than a million barrels of crude per day, the majority of it transported by rail. Flexibility is one of the primary advantages rail provides an upstream producer of crude oil; a valuable product can now be shipped to refineries on the East Coast, on the Gulf Coast, or on the West Coast, as capacity and need requires, through BNSF’s 32,500-mile rail network and in conjunction with other rail lines. BNSF is also providing leadership in the efforts to make crude-by-rail as safe as possible, purchasing new rail tank cars with safer designs. Beyond the Bakken, BNSF is active in the Eagle Ford and Barnett fields in Texas, and in the Niobrara in Colorado.

BNSF Railway is a great American brand, now part of the portfolio of brands (including GEICO) owned by Berkshire Hathaway. It would take much longer than 15 minutes to tell the story of SullivanPerkins’ ten-year relationship as an agency for BNSF Railway, but here’s one example of the work we do to help fuel the growth of BNSF’s crude-by-rail business: