Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Co. recently announced that it will begin delivering train units to a new ethanol storage terminal owned by Musket Corp., a privately owned petroleum and petroleum products wholesaler, on Nov. 1.
The storage terminal, located in Dallas/Fortworth, has a capacity of 10 million gallons and is one of the largest ethanol storage facilities in the region. The facility maintains its own rail spur and is designed to completely unload a unit train of 95 cars every 24 hours.
Upon arriving at the facility, the ethanol-filled tank cars are drained by an underground piping system. The fuel is then pumped into four storage tanks and is ready to be pumped directly into trucks for local distribution.
According to BNSF, the new facility will receive shipments exclusively from BNSF Railway’s Ethanol Express, a 95-car unit train service specifically created to move ethanol from a single origin or gathering place to a single destination. The company serves both large-scale and small-scale producers, as single-car transportation is also available.
BSNF created the Ethanol Express in 2003 to ship ethanol to California after the state banned the gasoline additive methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE). The program was designed to save ethanol producers time and money through increased fleet utilization, lower inventory carrying costs and logistics coordination.