At a time when large corporations have had an unprecedented degree of power to impose themselves on the landscape in the name of jobs, a group of citizens, environmental activists, native tribes and businesses in the Pacific Northwest have dealt a series of stunning blows against development.
Since the 1990s, a group of large mining companies, railroads and maritime terminal operators have sought to use the Northwest’s Columbia River and Puget Sound waterways as a jumping-off point for rapidly expanded coal exports to China and other developing nations.
Under proposals from companies such as SSA Marine, Ambre Energy and Kinder Morgan, a total of six rail-accessed port facilities were proposed that would create thousands of construction and long-term operational jobs and generate millions of dollars in local tax revenues to help transport plentiful coal deposits from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana.
Citizens from the affected states, however, have thrown a wrench in these plans, convincing regulators to deny permits to four of the six proposals for environmental reasons. The most recent blow came on Aug. 18, when the Oregon Department of State Lands denied Ambre Energy’s permit request for a $242 million, 8 million-ton-per-day Coyote Island coal transfer facility at the Columbia River port of Morrow, Ore.
With the Oregon projects shut down, only the two largest terminal proposals are left on the drawing board: 1) the 48 million-ton-per-day Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point, Wash., and 2) the 44 million-ton-per-day Millennium Bulk Terminal in Longview, Wash.
According to Power Past Coal, one of the leading nonprofit coalitions opposing the plans, the Washington state proposals would increase rail traffic significantly, with up to 18 extra trains per day rolling through coastal towns, tying up car traffic for hours for the hundreds of towns with at-grade crossings. The added trains also raise a greater risk of derailments near population areas.
The environmental impacts, however, would be much greater, the group says. The open-air coal cars that would be used in these long trains emit about 500 pounds of coal dust per car into the skies along the route. More dust would also be released near the terminal sites as the coal is dumped in giant piles and loaded onto ships at new cargo piers that would need to be built.
The chosen locations for the rail terminals are hardly pristine wilderness; the Cherry Point site already has 225,000-barrel-per-day Phillips 66 oil refinery, and the Longview proposal is on the site of a former aluminum smelter. But Power Past Coal argues that the buffer zone of forest land surrounding the Cherry Point terminal, adjacent to the Lummi Indian Reservation, is still rich with both cultural heritage and intertidal species that help support local salmon runs.
A Black Eye for Big Coal
Coal train exporters run into an unexpected buzz-saw of grassroots opposition in the Pacific Northwest
By Randy Woods
Left: The type of open-air railcars that would be used in the project.
Above: Protesters get their point across at a 2012 hearing in Bellingham, Wash.
All photos courtesy of Power Past Coal