Draft Design Completed for the Largest Oil Rail Depot in the United States
April 20th, 2025
Railroad consultant, Branch Line Rail, completed the draft design of the oil loading railroad depot facility for the North Dakota Integrated Oil & Gas facility. The depot will rail oil to refineries on the Gulf of America with a design capacity of 700,000 barrels per day. This will be the largest facility of its type in the USA. Stakeholders previously were involved in the design, funding and construction of the Bakkan Oil Express that came online in 2012 and eventually expanded to 200,000 barrels per day – which was the largest facility of its type then.
The end game is to ultimately transition and fuel the diesel locomotives at the depot to green diesel versus fossil diesel. SynSel would also be involved in the implementation of the green diesel fuel platform.
The upstream Integrated Oil & Gas facility will be the source of downstream stranded gas. This stranded gas liberated by the oil development is estimated to be 600 cubic feet per barrel of oil produced or 420 million cubic feet per day. This much input stranded gas energy can deliver 3.5 GW of electricity on the output through the efficiency of combined cycle turbines.
SynSel has executed an MOU as the JV partner of the downstream AI Data Center Campus utilizing the stranded gas from the 3.5-billion-barrel Integrated Oil & Gas facility. The demand for power for the data center niche is estimated to triple by 2030: The demand for AI is growing faster than the energy grid can adapt. In the U.S., data center electricity use is expected to surpass 600 TWh by 2030, tripling current levels. https://www.foxnews.com/tech/what-ais-insatiable-appetite-power-means-our-future
The largest constraint for all AI data center developments is electric and natural gas utilities. Capacity is already committed to clients under contract. The Integrated Oil & Gas facility avoids this utility grid constraint in that the “utility” is the upstream stranded gas – utilities are bypassed.