Greased Rails for Oil and Coal

PHOTO: Globe and Mail/Canadian Pacific

Some of us remember the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973-74 when the foreign oil we depend on was cut back, resulting in cars lining up for gas and higher prices at the pump. The embargo also prompted a law outlawing export of our domestic oil to foreign countries. There have been several incidences since then of threats to our life styles due to dependence on foreign oil imports, prompting many words about the necessity of U.S. achieving energy independence.

Well, thanks to fracking technology advances, domestic oil production may outstrip refinery capacity within 18 months to three years, according to an analyst at FBR Capital Markets Corp. Net petroleum imports now account for about 40 percent of demand, down from 60 percent in 2005, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the Energy Department research unit. Output is putting the nation on pace to surpass Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer by 2020, according to Energy Department data.

In order to maintain the growth in domestic oil production despite the limits of refinery capacity, the law prohibiting export of domestic oil may have to be lifted by Congress. ( U.S. Considers Exporting More Oil for First Time Since ’70s  )

This puts Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, already in prime position to profit from transporting coal to be exported from facilities proposed in Washington and Oregon, in an equally prime position to profit from transporting oil to be exported— should the oil export ban be lifted.

The rail lines are already in place and BNSF since last year has been supplying the Tesoro refinery near Anacortes with a third of its crude oil from the Bakken oil fields in Montana and North Dakota. You might have seen those 100-car shipments on their way to Anacortes; we can expect to see many more when Bakken crude oil deliveries by rail begin to the Phillips and Shell refineries as well as to the BP refinery in Ferndale, which currently receives Bakken crude oil via barge from a Clatskanie, Oregon, terminal until its refinery rail line is completed.

Pipelines like BC’s Northern Gateway to carry Alberta tar sands oil and Kinder Morgan to carry Canadian Bakken crude and the yet-to-be-approved Keystone pipeline are all still in play, but the oil transport games changed rapidly in the last year.

“America’s energy boom has left the middle of the country awash in cheap oil. But as pipeline companies scramble to spend billions of dollars to build new pipes to tap these hot new fields, they’re discovering that railroads have beaten them to the punch. By laying a few extra miles of track and building new loading facilities, oil and gas operators are quickly connecting remote areas of oil production with the existing networks of big railroads such as Union Pacific and BNSF Railway. On the other end, they’re running tracks directly into refining complexes as far away as Philadelphia and Puget Sound. These rail projects can often be finished in a matter of months at a cost that’s usually in the millions, not billions.” Amid U.S. Oil Boom, Railroads Are Beating Pipelines in Crude Transport  

The Port of Grays Harbor which boasts itself to be “Washington’s only deep water port on the Pacific coast”, in hopeful anticipation of some boom times to come their way, dropped plans to develop a coal export facility and instead has been moving forward with a proposal to build a crude oil export facility served by rail.

Notwithstanding the Port’s declaration that the “oil industry is one of the most regulated industries. State and federal laws and policies will govern construction, operations and shipping protocols,” a coalition of Friends of Grays Harbor, Grays Harbor Audubon Society, Citizens for A Clean Harbor, Surfrider Foundation, and Sierra Club has concerns about putting nearly 100 million gallons of crude oil on the edge of the Grays Harbor Estuary. The coalition filed an appeal to the Substantial Development Permit granted to Westway Terminal Company, LLC by the City of Hoquiam and Department of Ecology. Citing failure to follow the law and errors in application of the law, the appeal asks the Shorelines Hearings Board to reverse the permit and the Mitigated Determination of Non-Significance and require an Environmental Impact Statement for the project. So has the Quinault Indian Nation.

According to Curt Hart at the Department of Ecology, the state has regulatory authority when oil is transferred over water, from land to ship or from ship to land. While the state cannot pre-empt federal laws and regulations governing shipping operations, contingency response plans for oil spills and equipment are required of transports over water. Washington state has a rescue tug at Neah Bay paid for by the shipping industry.

Not so for trains carrying oil or coal or your caustic chemical. As interstate commerce solely under federal regulations, railways don’t need to declare what they are carrying or when or where. Only after there is an accident must they declare their manifest to first responders. Each rail car of oil carries about 28,000 gallons; a spill in a rail yard is one thing; a spill along a waterway like the Columbia River or Puget Sound is another.

If the boom in oil and coal transport by rail is put into the equation of jobs vs. environment, constructive discussion tends to bog down, so I’d put the question in terms of asking who benefits from this boom in resource extraction and export and who or what is put at risk by this boom without benefit? It’s a rather selfish way of looking at what some might consider progress and others regress, but maybe by starting there, we can begin discussing how to share the benefits and the risks in an equitable way.

--Mike Sato

A True Legacy

Iceberg Point (Wikimedia)

On most days, real issues are painted in shades of gray and we need to tease out the surrounding facts and values in order to come to a clearer position. Some days, we’re blessed.

Today, President Obama will will designate the 1,000-plus acres in the San Juan Archipelago under the Bureau of Land Management as the San Juan Islands National Monument, the third in Washington state.

A lot of folks worked for a lot of years to bring the designation forward and, despite congressional barriers, have succeeded in establishing permanent protection via executive action.

There were never any serious objections to permanent protection of these lands. Some folks on principle didn’t want what they considered more federal government involvement, glossing over the fact that the lands were already under federal government administration. Some folks feared monument status would jeopardize the islands’ ambiance with more visitors, forgetting that innocence was lost many years ago with features in national and international publications and guide books.

A colleague said, “It’s great that he (the President) is doing this before something bad happened.” How often can we say that when talking about the issues we face in the Salish Sea?

Permanent protection of lands like the San Juan Islands National Monument is the true legacy we seek, a legacy in an every changing world rapidly shrinking in wildness. I won’t begrudge anyone’s efforts to push for a coal port or an oil pipeline or anyone’s belief that the few jobs that industrialization provides trumps the natural world— but I’ll fight those efforts and work to find other good jobs for folks because on a day like today, it’s clear that’s not the legacy I value.

I find it better to imagine the children of a future time visiting the lands of the San Juan Islands National Monument than standing in the shadows of a coal export facility.

Thank you, good citizens and President Obama, for establishing a true legacy.

(To add your name to say ‘Thank you’ in ads to run in local papers, send your name (and the name of your group or business you represent) to Islanders for the San Juan Islands National Monument.)

--Mike Sato

Putting A Price On Nature

(AP Photo/Maritime New Zealand, Graeme Brown)

I’ve been thinking about oil transport and oil spills after reading some of the stories about the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline project and oil tanker routes in British Columbia.  So have a few other readers.

Liz commented on an article posted about the dangers posed by supertankers laden with the pipeline oil from the Kitimat port on the B.C. coast. She pointed out: “While it is not a tanker, the mammoth cargo ship over in New Zealand provides a sobering example of how difficult it can be to contain a wrecked, sinking large vessel.” That would be the Rena, grounded since October and now sinking off the east coast of New Zealand.

It’s always after spill and cleanup efforts that a cost is put on the social, economic and natural resource damages. That’s when we get some kind of order of magnitude when a Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon disaster unfolds or a Nestucca or Rena or Exxon Valdez spills its oil.

Why not before the fact, another reader asked? Is anyone modeling and calculating the social, economic and natural resource cost if an spill were to occur in or around the supertanker routes in Hecate Strait?

There’s a good map at the Globe and Mail depicting the tanker routes, Where the Gateway leads: Tanker routes to Kitimat

There’s a YouTube video modeling what a spill might look like and what will be affected, Tar Sands and Tankers Part 4: Modeling a BC Spill

As reported by the Vancouver Sun’s Larry Pynn, project proponent Enbridge has made its own estimates of how a spill would affect the tanker transit areas.

“Enbridge environmental studies suggest that the condensate would evaporate relatively quickly, producing ‘short-lived toxic effects.’

“It would take up to five years for the Kitimat intertidal zone to recover from a spill of 250 cubic metres of bitumen, as much as two years for condensate, Enbridge calculates.

“A major bitumen spill from a tanker would be much more serious, affecting all levels of the food chain, fouling the feathers of birds, contaminating fish spawning and rearing areas, invertebrates and marine mammals.

“The depth and longevity of effects would depend, in part, on the amount spilled, location and time of year.

“An Enbridge study calculated that a spill of 36,000 cubic metres of bitumen — on the order of the Exxon Valdez spill — in Wright Sound would contaminate 240 kilometres of shoreline in 15 days.

“It could take four years for exposed rocky shores to recover, up to 12 years for sheltered shores.” ( What if a supertanker tanks? )

So how much in dollars (Canadian, if you want) would the social, economic and natural resource costs be for spills like this? What’s that kelp bed worth? That nesting duck? That salmon stream? The years of closed fishery? The loss of a culture?

And wouldn’t it be reasonable for these costs to be agreed upon in the project permitting process and for project approval be contingent on the project proponents insuring with a performance bond the amount of damages risked by its operations?

Oil guys claim all the time that an accident won’t happen. That’s date cheap talk and we’ve seen unthinkable accidents happen again and again.

Until a fair price is paid for using the people’s marine waters and insuring it won’t be damaged, risks continue to be socialized and profits privatized.

It’s not up to the government on behalf of the people to prove that risks in the project exist; it’s up to the project proponents to prove that they will minimize the risks and be responsible for any damage that might occur— from the smallest incident to the worst-case scenario.

I recall giving a talk once about what a wetland was worth and finding a couple of birders rather upset in referring to how wetlands help avoid paying for expensive runoff pollution facilities. They would have preferred the worth to be limited to the natural and aesthetic.

So would I but in a capitalist system we use the tools we have to accomplish what’s right and fair— and in this case it happens to be putting a price tag on nature.

(On the subject of putting a price tag on nature, you must read — in a completely different vein— Carl Safina’s current blog “Bluefin Tuna: New Record Price for Carcass Further Devaluates the Fish” where he bemoans how the news media reported the story of a single bluefin tuna selling at wholesale auction in Tokyo for a record $736,000. Good stuff.)

--Mike Sato

"Well, sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world"

PHOTO: Dangerous Minds

The line’s from Bruce Springsteen’s song Nebraska.

It came to mind yesterday when House Republicans passed a bill extending the payroll tax break and long-term unemployment payments— along with approving construction of the Keystone oil pipeline from Canada through our nation’s Midwest communities.

How cynical can elected representatives be in getting for industrial capitalists what they want by holding the economic well being of this nation’s workers and unemployed hostage?

Politics is the art of the possible, a phrase coined by Bismark.

House Republicans play "politics," the kind of all-or-nothing governing that give politics a bad name.  When the Democrats play “politics” that way, I’d call a pox on their house as well.

The Keystone pipeline issue should be dealt with as a separate issue. It should not be tagged on to a bill about a worker tax break and unemployment relief.

Eric Cantor (R-VA) said tagging on approval of the Keystone pipeline was justified because pipeline construction was a jobs issue.

It’s not a jobs issue. It’s an energy policy issue. It’s an issue of how local community values stack up against a project where communities bear all the risk and little benefit. Like building a coal export terminal at Cherry Point and transporting coal by rail or building a liquified natural gas terminal and pipeline near the mouth of the Columbia river, do these projects fit our national energy policy?  I’m sure there will be jobs and some local benefits but are those jobs and local benefits in the long-term interests of local community values?

Be honest and have that discussion. Shame on House Republicans.

--Mike Sato