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Collection: Northwest Coal & Oil Exports

What a Coal Terminal is Really Like

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This is required reading—and viewing—for anyone worried about how export terminals handle coal in reality: a jaw-dropping exposé on the pollution from Ridley Terminals at Prince Rupert, British Columbia. You absolutely must click through and see the photos collected by The Northern View newspaper in it’s excellent investigation of Ridley.

Here are a few of the alarming findings from the paper’s investigation into coal-handling at the facility:

“There’s a certain amount of coal that sticks to the belts, and as it makes its run underneath the belt back it falls off… There’s coal just falling everywhere… Everywhere there’s a corner it just builds and falls off and jams belts, and then it falls into the ocean,” a reliable source, who has authorized access to the site, told The Northern View.

And:

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Industry Pollution Expert Calls for Comprehensive Review of Coal Transport Along Railways

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Roger O. McClellan is regularly trotted out by coal export backers whenever they are trying to dismiss concerns about coal dust pollution. Yet last week in a Seattle Times opinion piece on  pollution from coal transport, he called for a comprehensive review of coal export plans, including along railways:

Debate over the terminals should be grounded in scientific facts and analysis. Well-established scientific approaches should be used to evaluate any potential environmental and human-health impacts.

Scientific assessments such as the one being conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers should provide clarity and context for decisions by public officials. Science-based assessments should also identify any constraints needed to assure protection of the environment and public health. The public at large should encourage and, indeed, demand such assessments.

Good for him.

Although this is not the first time McClellan has said he supports a comprehensive review, such a plain public statement should come as a blow to coal export proponents.

When someone like McClellan calls for a comprehensive analysis of the dangers of coal dust escape from trains, it signals the true breadth of the opposition to fast-tracking approval for the proposed terminals. He has, after all, made a career of arguing for relaxed air quality standards, and he has often been paid by fossil fuel interests to provide expert testimony to government regulators. Yet as McClellan says, the Power Past Coal campaign and others are absolutely right to demand a region-wide assessment of the impacts of shipping coal.

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Kinder Morgan’s Coal Export Scheme Bites the Dust

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Huge news on the coal export front just now. As Scott Learn at The Oregonian reports, “Kinder Morgan drops plan to build coal export terminal at Port of St. Helens industrial park.”

Kinder Morgan had been planning to export as much as 30 million tons of coal each year on the Columbia River from a site near Clatskanie, Oregon, but their plans ran into a buzz saw of opposition from local communities, environmental and health advocates, and even nearby industrial users. This morning they announced that they are officially abandoning their plans to build a coal terminal at Port Westward.

Sightline’s research was instrumental in the debate. We published extensive documentation of Kinder Morgan’s problems with coal dust at their terminals, as well as the company’s lengthy rap sheet of fraud, illegal dumping, and lax safety. A month after we published our research, the utility PGE announced that it would not sublease its land at Port Westward to Kinder Morgan out of concern that the spread of coal dust would damage its gas turbines. Since then, the firm has struggled to configure its plans, but local opposition continued to mount while prices in Asia weakened.

Today’s news amounts to a huge victory for the Power Past Coal campaign. Of the six coal export terminals originally planned for the Northwest, three have now been withdrawn, in large part owing to an enormous backlash to the plans.

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Recent Coal Export Trends: Q4 2012

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I’m a bit late getting to this, but here’s quarterly data from the latest coal report from the US Energy Information Administration, taking us up through the end of 2012:

us coa ex_q42012

Nationally, the big story was that coal exports fell for the second consecutive quarter. By the end of 2012, quarterly shipments were down by 25 percent from the historic highs registered during the second quarter. Still, at 28 million tons, coal exports remained very high by historical standards.

A bit player in the national coal export story, the Western Customs District exported a little more than 2.1 million tons in the fourth quarter, a 16 percent increase from the third quarter.

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Coal: Digging Its Own Grave?

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Here’s another reason that coal companies have to worry about their long-term financial prospects: they’ll have to keep digging deeper and deeper to get at their coal. And digging deeper means spending more to get coal out of the ground, which can simultaneously raise coal prices and crimp coal company profits.

Even in the Powder River Basin (PRB) of Wyoming and Montana—an area renowned for its inexpensive coal—industry analysts expect production costs to rise steadily over the next few decades. See, for example, this detailed report prepared by the John T. Boyd Company, which projects steady cost increases in every single PRB coal mine currently in production or under consideration.

We’ve summarized that report’s mining cost projections in two different charts: a fancy version and a simple version.  First the fancy:

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The Northern Cheyenne Weigh In On Coal Exports

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It may be easy to think that the coal export debate is mostly about trains, street closures, coal dust, and vessel traffic. And it is about that. But it is equally about the big country east of the Rockies where new mines and rail projects act like daggers pointed at a much older way of life.

Like many tribes in the interior, the Northern Cheyenne are staunch opponents of the coal export proposals in Oregon and Washington. For a taste of their righteous fury, I highly recommend reading Vanessa Braided Hair on Why the Otter Creek Mine Will Never Be Built.

Here’s an excerpt:

Arch Coal understands money. What Arch Coal doesn’t understand is community. They don’t understand history. They don’t understand the Cheyenne people whose ancestors fought and died for the land that they are proposing to destroy. They don’t understand the fierceness with which the people, both Indian and non-Indian, in southeastern Montana love the land.

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Coal Exports: Two Weeks of Good News

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Miles-long coal train
Miles-long coal train
Miles-long coal train. Credit stpaulgirl.

It’s been a busy—and from my standpoint, mostly heartening—few weeks on the coal export front. When you string together all the new developments, there are more and more signs that coal export proposals are on the ropes.

Here’s a quick summary of the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Fortnight for would-be Pacific Northwest coal exporters:

  • March 24, 2013 (Seattle, WA): WA Governor Jay Inslee and Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber submitted a letter asking the Obama Administration to review the climate-change consequences of leasing and exporting Western coal. The governors urged a comprehensive analysis of the impacts of long-term investment in coal generation in Asia; raised questions about low lease rates on federal lands; and argued that the pollution and climate impacts from the expansion of coal leasing on federal lands would “dwarf almost any other action that the government could take in the foreseeable future.” The Seattle Times has more details.
  • Friday, March 29, 2013 (Port of Morrow, OR): Ambre Energy, a financially troubled Australian startup, got into a public fight with Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality accusing it of unfairly delaying permits. In its public statements, Ambre signaled that it needs those permits to attract investment: “If we move forward with the DEQ permit, we can show to our investors that there is a regulatory (system) in this state that moves forward, that has clarity.” Ambre had earlier demanded that the Oregon Department of State Lands issue its approval for the project; the company backed down and agreed to a five month extension (to September 1, 2013), after the state signalled that it was prepared to deny the permit outright.

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The Reality of Coal Jobs, Canadian Edition

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While reading up on Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline, I came across a table so compelling that I had to share the results. As I’ve pointed out before, coal sector investments are a lousy way to create jobs. It’s true in the US, and particularly in the West.

Not surprisingly, it’s true in Canada too. The redoubtable Marc Lee at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives demonstrated as much with a nifty input-output analysis that allowed him to calculate the employment impacts of investments across a range of economic sectors. Just as we’ve seen in the US, coal is about the worst you can do.

ScreenHunter_30 Mar. 27 13.30

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How Coal Affects Water Quality: State of the Science

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After a recent spill at a British Columbia marine coal export terminal, the general manager was quoted in a local newspaper saying:

There’s a lot of misinformation around coal. Coal is a naturally-occurring mineral. It is not toxic.

Leaving aside his non sequitur—plenty of naturally-occurring minerals are toxic—he’s right that coal is subject to a lot of misinformation. There is a lot we should know, but don’t, about coal. For example, we don’t know nearly enough about how coal and coal dust near terminals can alter freshwater and marine environments.

There’s no doubt that coal often contains a range of nasty pollutants, including uranium, thorium, arsenic, mercury, lead, and other elements that are toxic at low concentrations. But it’s also believed to be true that most of those substances do not enter the environment, at least not in large quantities, until the coal is mined, burned, or otherwise tampered with.

Despite the fact that the global coal trade moves somewhere in the range of a billion tons of coal on the oceans each year, there has been very little research into the effects of coal and coal dust on waterways and the ecosystems they support. As the Northwest considers adding as much as 140 million tons of coal export capacity on rivers and coasts that are home to sensitive and endangered species, it is a question that demands rigorous inquiry. What follows is our attempt to summarize the most germane findings from published scientific research.

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The Coal Industry’s Falling Productivity

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Interesting factoid: an hour of labor produces about 25 percent less coal today than it did a decade ago.

Source: US Energy Information Administration
Source: US Energy Information Administration

Declining labor productivity means rising costs and slimmer profits for coal companies—adding to the woes of an industry that’s already reeling from slumping demand. But it’s not like the coal industry is doing something wrong to make productivity fall. It’s mostly a matter of geology: like any industry, coal miners started on the easy stuff—the coal that was closest to the surface and easiest to mine. But as the easy coal gets mined out, it gets harder and harder to get new coal out of the ground.

That’s the picture for the US as a whole—but the national picture includes the high-cost mines in Appalachia. So what about the western US with its cost-efficient (though environmentally troubling) strip mines?

Same basic story. Here’s a chart of the productivity of the nation’s highest-volume coal mine, the Black Thunder operation in Wyoming.

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