Oregon Approves Subsidy For Oil Transport, Not Coal
By Tony Schick, August 22, 2014
The Oregon Transportation Commission voted Friday to deny funding for controversial coal exports but approved subsidies that will allow more oil trains to travel along the Columbia River.
The Oregon Transportation Commission Friday voted to deny funding for controversial coal exports but approved subsidies that will allow more oil trains to travel along the Columbia River. Credit McD22 / Flickr
The subsidies were part of a $42 million package of transportation grants using money from the state’s lottery. Only one project was denied: $2 million for the Port of St. Helens to expand a dock for exporting coal.
The coal would have come by train from Wyoming to eastern Oregon, and from there it would have been barged down the Columbia. That project was denied a crucial permit this week, but the transportation commission did approve $5 million for projects that benefit oil by rail.
Regna Merritt of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility said she hoped concerns about oil train explosions would have swayed the commission.
“The health and safety issues were taken quite seriously by dozens of elected officials, and we wish that their concerns had been taken more seriously by the commission,” Merritt said.
One grant gives $3 million for improvements on a rail line through Rainier, making it safer and allowing for more oil trains. An additional $2 million will help expand a dock where the oil from North Dakota is transferred onto ships bound for West Coast refineries.
The port said the expansions have long-term benefits beyond shipping fossil fuels.
Repost from the Salem, Oregon Statesman Journal [Editor: See quotes from Benicia’s Andrés Soto near end of this article. – RS]
Sharp rise in West Coast oil trains, fears abound
Gosia Wozniacka, Associated Press | May 26, 2014
VANCOUVER, Wash. (AP) — Residents along the scenic Columbia River are hoping to persuade regulators to reject plans for what would be the Pacific Northwest’s largest crude oil train terminal — the proposed destination for at least four trains a day, each more than a mile long.
The increasing numbers of trains, each carrying tens of thousands of barrels of potentially volatile crude from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota, have raised concerns around the country after nine accidents in the past year, including one last month in Virginia.
In Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia from Portland, Oregon, the oil companies say their proposed terminal will create at least 80 permanent jobs and will bring an economic windfall to the region. But area residents and others in nearby communities are worried about the risks to people, wildlife, businesses and to their way of life.
“We depend on the Columbia for moving freight, generating power, irrigating farms, fishing,” said Eric LaBrant, president of the Fruit Valley Neighborhood Association, which represents about 2,000 residents who live next to the proposed site.
“Anywhere on the Columbia, an oil spill would cripple our economy,” he said.
The river is, in a way, the soul of the Pacific Northwest. It is cherished for its beauty, for its recreational offerings like wind surfing, and for the salmon and steelhead caught by sport fishermen, commercial fishermen and Native Americans.
The fight over the terminal underscores a new reality on the West Coast: The region is receiving unprecedented amounts of crude oil by rail shipments, mostly from the oil boom in North Dakota, Montana and parts of Canada.
More than a dozen oil-by-rail refining facilities and terminals have been built in California, Oregon and Washington in the past three years. As a result, long oil trains are already rolling through rural and urban areas alike — including along the iconic Columbia.
Another two dozen new projects or expansions are planned or in the works in those three states.
While traditionally most crude has moved to Gulf Coast and the East Coast terminals and refineries, experts say there’s a West Coast boom because of cheap rail transport prices and its proximity to Asian markets should Congress lift a ban on U.S. oil exports.
Oil by rail shipments through Oregon ballooned from about 1.6 million barrels of crude carried on 2,789 tank cars in 2009 to more than 11 million barrels on 19,065 tank cars in 2013, according to annual railroad company reports.
In California, the volume of crude imported by rail skyrocketed from 45,500 barrels carried on 63 tank cars in 2009 to more than 6 million barrels on 8,608 tank cars in 2013, according to data by the California Energy Commission.
The state estimates its oil-by-rail shipments will rise to 150 million barrels per year in 2016.
And in Washington state, crude oil shipments went from zero barrels in 2011 to 17 million barrels in 2013, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology, though officials said those numbers are rough estimates.
The two main rail companies, Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe, say they work hard to prevent accidents by inspecting tracks and bridges, investing in trailers with fire-fighting foam and providing hazmat training to emergency responders.
Still, the spike in shipments has led to concerns among officials in the Pacific Northwest over rail safety and oil spill responsiveness — and to opponents lashing out at rail companies for not disclosing how much oil is being shipped and where. Railroad companies aren’t required to disclose such information.
In some cases, oil-by-rail transports on the West Coast started without the knowledge of local communities or emergency responders.
A terminal near Clatskanie, 62 miles northwest of Portland, was permitted to move oil two years ago by Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality without a public process. This year, the state fined the facility for moving six times more crude than allowed.
The disclosure caused public protests, but the company, Global Partners, says it’s following the law.
In the San Francisco Bay area, where the local air district in February issued a permit to operate a crude-by-rail project in Richmond without notice to the public or an environmental review, residents and environmental groups filed a lawsuit.
They are seeking a preliminary injunction and a suspension of the air permit, pending a full environmental review.
“We feel that we were deliberately deceived by the permitting authority,” said Andres Soto, the Richmond organizer for Communities for a Better Environment, an environmental justice group that’s a plaintiff in the case.
“The delivery of this product right next to schools, to neighborhoods, where literally you can throw a rock and hit these rail cars, presents a clear danger to literally thousands of residents,” Soto said.
The fears are shared by many in Vancouver, where officials received more than 33,000 public comments about the project — detailing feared impacts to air quality, wildlife, recreation, tribal treaty rights, and home values, among others.
After a review, state officials will make a recommendation to Gov. Jay Inslee, who has the final say.
ODOT acts to limit disclosure of oil train shipments after The Oregonian won its release
By Rob Davis | April 22, 2014
Heavily redacted forms released by ODOT show where oil moves by rail in Oregon and the specific volume. The agency plans to no longer seek the reports.
The Oregon Department of Transportation, the state’s rail safety overseer, says it will no longer ask railroads for reports detailing where crude oil moves through the state after The Oregonian successfully sought to have them made public.
Railroads “provided us courtesy copies with the understanding we wouldn’t share it — believing it might be protected,” ODOT spokesman David Thompson said in an email. “We now know that the info is NOT protected; so do the railroads.”
The result? At a time of heightened public concern about increasing volumes of crude oil moving by rail in Oregon, ODOT is reducing the flow of information that has benefited not only the public but its own employees.
State law requires railroads to annually submit detailed reports saying what dangerous substances they’ve moved, where and in what volume. They’re due to emergency responders across the state by March 1 of each year. That hasn’t been happening.
The reports have been sent to ODOT instead, which historically acted as a central hub, providing the information on request to firefighters across the state.
ODOT officials say that process needs reform. But as ODOT begins working to change those disclosure rules, its officials say they no longer need any reports.
“The exact quantity of those specific shipments doesn’t impact our work,” said Shelley Snow, another ODOT spokeswoman. “Our focus is on any and all shipments traveling through the state.”
If ODOT safety inspectors need to know anything about hazardous material trends, Snow said, they can call railroads to ask.
The reports ODOT has received are the public’s only way to know how much oil moves by rail through specific corridors in Oregon. They provide the most comprehensive view of the volumes hauled through Portland, Salem, Bend, Eugene and Klamath Falls.
Trains in Oregon carry the same type of flammable North Dakota oil involved in three high-profile explosions last year, including one that killed 47 people and leveled part of a Canadian town. Rob Davis/The Oregonian
They’ve also been valuable for ODOT’s employees. Michael Eyer, a retired ODOT rail safety inspector, said he used the annual reports to do his job. The reports helped Eyer spot trends, see whether new hazards were moving and decide where to target his field inspections.
“It was our only institutional memory,” Eyer said. “There’s no other place to get the data, no other way to have this information.”
Railroads won’t tell the public how much hazardous material such as crude oil they move, saying it’s a security risk, even though the tank cars move openly in labeled containers.
The Oregonian in March obtained an order from the state Department of Justice that required ODOT to release the reports. Not disclosing them “could infringe on the public’s ability to assess the local and statewide risks” posed by crude oil rail shipments, a Justice Department attorney said.
The heavily redacted forms showed exactly where oil moved in the state through 2012. But ODOT said it did not have reports for 2013, a year in which oil-by-rail shipments increased 250 percent in Oregon.
The Oregonian requested 2013 records on April 14, more than a month after they were due. ODOT said it still didn’t have them and didn’t plan to seek them from railroads.
The decision typifies the unusual lengths to which ODOT goes to accommodate the railroads it regulates. Though it is supposed to be an independent safety watchdog, ODOT’s rail division treats the companies it oversees as cooperative stakeholders.
“I’m certainly concerned by what I hear and want to find out about that,” said state Rep. Barbara Smith Warner, a Portland Democrat who’s taken an interest in oil train safety.
Eyer and another retired ODOT rail official said the agency’s move is a bad idea that could threaten public safety.
“Because of your records request, they’re trying to bail out,” Eyer said. “I don’t think for safety it’s the wisest decision. It puts us in a situation where no one knows the overall picture. Things will fall through the cracks.”
If the reports aren’t collected, new rail inspectors hired by ODOT won’t have any background material to know what’s historically moved around the state, Eyer said. “Any new inspector coming in will be dependent on the kindness of strangers,” he said.
Claudia Howells, a former ODOT rail administrator, said forcing the state’s lone hazardous materials inspector to make phone calls to determine what dangerous substances were moving around the state would only add to the workload of someone already responsible for overseeing tens of thousands of shipments statewide.
“Part of the function of government regulatory systems is to act as a referee and provide assurance to the public that things are as they should be,” Howells said. “Right now, I have a higher level of confidence in the railroads than their regulator.”
Repost from The Seattle Times
[Editor: Regarding CUMULATIVE IMPACTS, we in the San Francisco Bay Area need to learn from the Pacific Northwest. Their maps are excellent – check out this great resource. Who among us can work on this? It seems to me that the Bay Area Air Quality Management District should be held responsible to prepare maps like this as soon as possible. – RS]
Fossil fuels and spill risk: A changing landscape
By Seattle Times staff | April 19, 2014
Washington has long been a fossil fuel depot. But changes in how and where we get our oil — and the addition of proposals to export coal — are increasing the risk of spills and major accidents. Here is how fossil fuel distribution is changing.
(The maps and charts below are formatted as a single PNG IMAGE. Click on the image for a full-size readable version.)
The maps and charts above are formatted as a single PNG IMAGE. Click on the image for a full-size readable version.
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