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Collection: Northwest Coal & Oil Exports

The Climate Impact of Coal Exports

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One of the nation’s most respected resource economists, Dr. Thomas M. Power, just released a new white paper showing that coal exports to China will increase that country’s coal burning and pollution, and decrease investments in energy efficiency. In a nutshell, Power demonstrates that the planned coal export facilities in the Northwest would add to the … Read more

Coal Cares

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inhaler-flickr-arycorgeThis is a step in the right direction for the coal industry: energy giant Peabody is buying asthma inhalers for kids affected by coal-burning power plants.

I just wish they weren’t using the opportunity to push dubious attacks on clean energy like these:

Coal power is solar power. That’s because millions of years ago, before coal began to form from decaying organic matter, the sun provided the energy that organic matter required to grow and die.

Wind Kills. Wind turbines can kill up to 70,000 birds per year, or 4.27 birds per turbine per year. Coal particulate pollution, on the other hand, kills fewer than 13,000 people per year.

Solar Burns. In just 30 minutes, a human being absorbs 2.5 million joules of energy from the sun—enough, for most people, to cause sunburn.

None of that is really fair. But I suppose I should just be glad that the industry is finally acknowledging the harm they do to low-income communities.

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What A Coal Export Terminal Looks Like

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Bellingham photographer Paul K. Anderson recently traveled to the Westshore Terminal in British Columbia to document what a coal export facility looks like. His images are an arresting preview of what could be in store for Longview, Bellingham, and other communities.

paul k anderson_chuckanut conservancy_dozer

Bigger version here. (Copyright Paul K. Anderson, Chuckanut Conservancy. Used with permission.)

The photos below provide a good sense for just how dirty these facilities are.

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Winning the Future By Destroying It

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coal mining-fxp-flickrWhen it comes to energy “we cannot be afraid of the future,” according to President Obama. But it would be a lot easier not to worry if Obama’s policies lived up to his rhetoric.

Instead, we get this: just a few weeks after Harvard Medical School researchers determined that the hidden costs of coal rack up to perhaps a half trillion dollars annually for the US public, the Obama administration decides to allow a staggering volume of coal strip mining in the eastern Rockies, and on publicly-owned land.

The newly leased public land is expected to yield 758 million tons of coal, enough to generate more than 1.3 billion tons of carbon-dioxide when burned. That’s more carbon pollution than all the energy—from planes, factories, cars, power plants, etc. — used in an entire year by all 44 nations in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean combined. Even worse, if mining interests have their way, a huge share of that coal will be exported to China where lax pollution controls are the norm.

You could be forgiven for thinking that President Obama isn’t aware of the horrific cost of that scale of coal mining. But that would be a bit odd, considering that just prior to the well-publicized arrival of Harvard Medical School’s new research, the National Academies found that the damages from burning coal for electricity are 20 times higher than the damages from natural gas, the next dirtiest (and costliest) fossil fuel used to produce power. And of course that report comes on the heels of the 2009 report from the National Academy of Sciences that US coal burning results in $60 billion in health costs alone.

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Train Spotting

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As I’ve been researching coal exports, I’ve stumbled upon the subculture of “railfans“—people who obsessively watch, and film, trains. (If that sounds silly, I defy you to spend a couple minutes listening to this one. It’s hypnotic, right?) There’s something mesmerizing about these things, particularly the “unit trains” that carry only a single commodity, such as coal, usually in identical railcars.

Here’s a good one taken in Seattle:

 

Okay, now shake off the cobwebs for a moment because there’s some information here too. These YouTube videos provide confirmation of what Peabody Energy has said to investors: that coal is already being shipped by rail from the Powder River Basin via the Columbia River Gorge and then north to Puget Sound and along the water all the way to the Westshore Terminal at Roberts Bank, British Columbia.

That’s almost certainly the route that Peabody would use to move its hoped-for 24 million tons of coal (or is it more?) to the planned Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point, which is just a few miles south of Roberts Bank. In other words—and this is the point—building coal export terminals could mean moving large quantities of coal through virtually every populous community in western Washington.

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Are Coal Export Terminals Good Neighbors?

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One of the primary objections to coal export terminals, at least among people who live near them, is the spread of coal dust. Coal is typically stored in large piles at export terminals, and these piles often generate significant quantities of coal dust when it’s windy or when the coal is disturbed or moved during the loading and unloading process. As one study put it, “coal terminals by their nature are active sources of fugitive dust.”*

Coal dust is, at minimum a nuisance; it’s probably a threat to water quality; and it’s possibly a danger to families’ health. In coal workers who are exposed to dust, for example, coal dust has been shown to cause bronchitis, emphysema, and black lung disease.

Here’s a look at how coal dust from terminals affects communities in North America.

In Seward, Alaska, an active lawsuit submits that coal dust blowing off the terminal’s stockpiles covers nearby fishing boats and neighborhoods with debris. It also argues that the conveyor system used to load ships and other export site operations drop coal dust directly into the local bay, violating the Clean Water Act. In 2010, the state of Alaska fined the railroad company that delivers the coal to the terminal $220,000 for failing to adequately control dust that dirtied Seward’s scenic harbor.

The Westshore coal export terminal at Robert’s Bank, just south of Vancouver, British Columbia, handles about 21 million tons annually. It unloads nearly 600 rail cars of coal each day on a peninsula jutting into the Strait of Georgia. Some residents of Point Roberts, a beachfront community three miles away from the export terminal, complain that coal dust blackens homes, patio furniture, and boats moored in the local marina. A comprehensive 2001 study* of coal dust emissions in Canada estimated that the Westshore Terminal emits roughly 715 metric tons of coal dust a year. And a recent study by researchers at the University of British Columbia found that the concentrations of coal dust in the vicinity of the terminal had doubled during the period from 1977 to 1999.

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Coal Companies Are Maybe Not Always Entirely Truthful

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Here we go again. Just last week, Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company, announced plans to export 24 million tons of coal annually from a large new shipping terminal to be built at Cherry Point near Bellingham. That’s enough coal to make Bellingham one of the biggest coal exporting sites in all of North … Read more

Coal Export Jobs In Context

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As the region considers the viability and wisdom of building new coal export facilities, there have been quite a few claims—not all of them entirely accurate—about jobs. So in the hopes of setting the record straight, here’s what the facts are.

  • Longview (Millenium Bulk Logistics, Ambre)—Estimates for the original version of the project were that operations would employ 70 people to move about 5 million tons of coal. The site currently employs 50 people, however, and news reports seem to indicate that the coal terminal would eliminate most of the activity related to those 50 jobs. So the gross number of coal jobs is 70, but the net is only 20.
  • Bellingham / Cherry Point (Pacific Gateway, Peabody)—Some of the publicity materials have claimed 430 jobs, but that doesn’t jibe with what’s in the actual project documents, which are absent the project’s website. In fact, the project developers say that a 25 million ton facility, which is planned to be operational in 2015, would employ 89 workers, and not until 2026, when the full 54 million ton facility is completed, would it employ 213 people.
  • Roberts Bank (Westshore Terminal) — The British Columbia coal export facility just south of Vancouver provides 260 jobs at a facility that ships around 20 million tons of coal per year.

Is that a lot or a little? Here’s some context:

coal jobs

In other words, if these terminals become operational:

  • Coal exports at Longview would directly increase employment in Cowlitz County by less than one half of one tenth of one percent.
  • Coal exports at Cherry Point would directly increase employment in Whatcom County by less than one tenth of one percent. 

Now, none of the above counts short-term construction jobs to build the facilities, and these could be significant. Let’s take a look at those now.

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Northwest Coal Exports

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Sightline is releasing a new research backgrounder today: it’s basically a “frequently asked questions” about coal exports from the Northwest. In “Northwest Coal Exports” we set down the basic facts of the case, including how much coal the US currently exports, what the new proposals involve, and what the pollution consequences might be. We also … Read more

Coal Exports and Carbon Consequences

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There’s a heated controversy over plans for Washington state ports to ship large volumes of coal to China. In fact, last week we learned that the coal companies had been lying to the small community of Longview, Washington.

In a proposal put forward to county commissioners and state officials, the company outlined plans for an export terminal that would handle around 5 million tons of coal annually. That’s a lot of coal. It raised eyebrows—and some meaningful opposition—in the town. And while it’s true that most of the concern in Longview wasn’t about carbon emissions, it’s worth taking a moment to assess the scale of the climate consequences.

When burned, 5 million tons of coal will release as much climate-changing carbon pollution as all the gasoline burned in a year by 2.6 million residents of Washington. For visual types, here’s a depiction:

coal_5 tons

Yet it turns out that 5 million tons of coal isn’t even half the story.

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