Riding the rails

Idle cars are giving some traders a place to store their oil

Think of American railcars and a freight train snaking across the Prairie or a commuter link into Penn Station will come to mind. These days, many of them are stationary – and they’re holding oil. “A lot of the conventional land storage tanks are full,” says Dennis Hoskins, managing partner at Energy Midstream, an oil-trading firm. So dumping crude in train cars is an answer. Interest in it is “spiking”, says Hoskins. “We’ve got some quantities stored in a railcar at the moment, which we’re looking to move and sell but it’s definitely something we would look at doing again.” Unable to access conventional storage, some of his firm’s oil is sitting on train lines in Ohio’s Utica region. But En