Oregon trail
Northwest transforming into fossil fuel export gateway
By Steve Horn
To many, the Pacific Northwest evokes a rugged, natural, outdoorsy and environmentally conscious locale. And, of course, in many ways it is.
But there’s another side to the story, too.
That is, the Northwest is quickly transforming into an “Oregon Trail” of sorts for fossil fuel exports, with all routes on the frontier leading to, or intending to lead to, the across-the-ocean Asia-Pacific region. Oregon and Washington have quietly become a major hub for transport and eventual exports or prospective exports of every major fossil fuel: coal, oil and natural gas.
As important as the final export destinations are what historian Christopher Jones calls “Routes of Power” — or the ways these fossil fuels get to export terminals to begin with. In the case of oil, coal and propane, it’s mostly by rail. For natural gas, pipelines reign supreme.
Northwest ports also play an important role and there is no better example of that than the ongoing fight between climate advocates and the Port of Seattle with regards to Shell Oil’s desire to use the Port as a staging area for Arctic drilling.
And while the fossil fuel industry and its investors have gambled big on the Northwest becoming a modern-day Oregon Trail leading to Asia, various movements have arisen, working to make them lose that bet.
Oil-by-rail, tar sands trains
As Chris Jones explains his book “Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America,” rail was the predominant way to get oil to market during the industry’s American infancy in the late 1800s. History has come full circle: What’s old is new again, given the bustle of oil-filled train cars moving the approximately 1.33 million barrels of crude per day from the Bakken region.
If the U.S. oil export ban, in place since the 1970’s, is lifted by Congress and the Executive Branch, refineries in Washington and Oregon would be fed what many critics call “bomb trains.” The term, first appearing in a December 2013 Associated Press article, was coined by rail industry consultant Sheldon Lustig after an explosion of a Burlington Northern Santa Fe-owned oil-by-rail train in Casselton, North Dakota.
Moving Bakken oil by rail has boomed, in a metaphorical sense. But given Bakken oil’s lighter, more volatile nature and propensity to explode, the risks are far from metaphorical.
“If all of the projects were built and operated at full capacity, they would put an estimated 22 mile-long trains per day on the Northwest’s railway system,” wrote Eric de Place, Sightline Institute’s policy director, in a June 2013 blog post. “In fact, if all of the oil-by-rail projects were built, they would be capable of moving nearly 800,000 barrels per day.”
It’s not just explosive Bakken oil moving to the Northwest. Enter: tar sands. Put on the map by the ongoing debate over TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, the Northwest is targeted by the industry as a potential hub for moving tar sands by rail.
In February, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that seven to ten tar sands trains owned by Union Pacific run through the state each month. Washington State has skin in the game, too, with a tar sands oil refining capacity of 57,000 barrels per day.
All of this amounts to more climate change-intensive and ecologically-hazardous fracking in North Dakota, as well as more extraction of Alberta tar sands. But various stakeholders are fighting back, across multiple fronts, and one fight in particular has huge significance in slowing things down in the Northwest.
On April 7, the Swinomish Native American tribe filed a lawsuit in federal court against BNSF for violating a 1991 treaty agreement which allowed BNSF to “send only one train in each direction across the reservation a day, and the train had to consist of 25 cars or less,” as explained by Sydney Brownstone, reporter for Seattle alt-weekly paper The Stranger.
Should they prevail, the implications would be massive. It is also a highly symbolic case, with Native Americans serving as primary victims of westward expansion in the U.S. along the Oregon Trail.
“If the Swinomish make the railroad limit trains through the reservation to two relatively small shipments a day, it would drastically cut crude-oil traffic through Seattle to the Tesoro refinery just north of the reservation,” Brownstone reported. “The Shell refinery in Anacortes also has a proposal for building a rail spur off the same line. If built, the Shell Puget Sound refinery would drive another 102-car-long unit train full of crude through the reservation a day.”
King Coal rolls through
Perhaps the best known fossil fuel export plans in the Northwest revolve around King Coal. These plans have received the greatest backlash and many of them have gone by the wayside as a result.
At one point, six companies had plans to export coal in the Northwest in various locations, all of which arrives to the region via train: the Port of Coos Bay, Oregon; the Port of Morrow in Portland, Oregon; the Port of St. Helens in Columbia City, Oregon; Millennium Bulk Logistics in Longview, Washington; Port of Grays Harbor in Aberdeen, Washington; and Gateway Pacific Terminal in Cherry Point, Washington.
Of those proposals, only three remain: Gateway Pacific, Millennium Bulk and Port of St. Helens. The rest have either been cancelled or, in the case of Port of Morrow, are well on the way to cancellation, a trend that has the coal industry and coal-friendly politicians panicking.
In the Gateway Pacific case, a coalition of Northwest tribes, led by the Lummi Nation, are fighting the proposed terminal and increased coal train activity, citing the high potential for spills, increased shipping traffic and invasive species more exports would bring to Lummi fisheries in Cherry Point. The multitude ecological impacts would infringe on the Lummi’s established treaty rights with the United States.
With each proposed terminal comes the environmental toll of the increased shipping necessary to take coal and other fossil fuels across the Pacific. New and expanded fossil fuel terminals would mean thousands more tanker, coal carrier and barge trips every year through communities and sensitive marine ecosystems, each bringing more air pollution and a chance of spills.
Arctic Battle for Seattle
Lastly, but perhaps first in the eyes of many, is the recent incarnation of the “Battle for Seattle.”
Unlike the original demonstration centered on the World Trade Organization’s meeting in Seattle in the late 1990’s, this one revolves around Shell Oil’s plans to use the Port of Seattle as a staging area for it Arctic drilling equipment. Environmentalists have come out against the plan; and the battle has begun, full-steam ahead.
Shell’s plans at the Port of Seattle largely escaped notice at first, mostly due to purposeful secrecy and a verbal non-disclosure agreement signed by port commissioners, as revealed by Sydney Brownstone at The Stranger. Slowly, journalists like Brownstone exposed secrets about Shell’s port plans, and the details are dirty and get dirtier.
The backlash against Shell’s plans hasn’t reached the size of the previous “Battle of Seattle” yet, but it is growing quickly. In mid-May, this came to a head as a coalition of “kayaktivists” took to the Seattle Harbor to disrupt two massive Shell drilling rigs stationed there.
That’s a good thing, given scientists wrote in a letter in Natural journal in January 2015 that “development of resources in the Arctic and any increase in unconventional oil production are incommensurate with efforts to limit average global warming to 2°C,” the temperature many climate scientists say is a “tipping point” in the direction of climate chaos and disaster.
Despite this warning, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management gave a conditional approval on May 11 to Shell to explore for oil in the Arctic’s Chukchi Sea, and the two rigs were in Seattle in May, waiting to head to the Arctic.
Oregon Trail, climate change frontier
What ties the Shell Arctic drilling Port of Seattle staging ground case study to the rest of the case studies is that it is only now possible to drill in the increasingly-melting Arctic due to climate change, caused by the burning, transportation and marketing of the rest of the fossil fuels highlighted throughout this piece.
The story of today’s Oregon Trail, then, is that of a frontier just like the original. But if the fossil fuel industry gets its way, the next frontier will be one at a major loss for the region, and for the climate.
Steve Horn is a Madison, Wis.-based freelance investigative journalist and a writer for DeSmogBlog.com. His writing has appeared in Vice News, Al Jazeera America, Wisconsin Watch, TruthOut, AlterNet and elsewhere.
This article originally appeared in Friends of the Earth’s spring 2015 newsmagazine.
