COAL
’S
BURNING ISSUES
• If the Port of Coos Bay becomes a
coal export terminal, open-topped coal
trains will come through
on their way
to the coast.
Eugene
500
• Coal trains can shed
lbs
to a ton of coal dust per car along their
route, and each train can have 120 cars.
• Doctors say coal dust from the
trains can lead to chronic bronchitis,
emphysema, pulmonary fi brosis
and environmental contamination
through the leaching of
toxic
heavy metals
.
• Coal trains average a mile to a
mile and half long and can hold up
traffi c at railroad crossings for 10 to 45
minutes.
• Rock from the Parvin Butte quarry,
whose owners were mining without a
permit, was slated to be used in the
ballast for the Coos Bay Rail Link that
would bring the coal to the coast.
37%
•
of Oregon’s electricity
comes from coal burning and although
Oregon’s only coal-fi red plant will stop
burning coal in 2020, power companies
import coal-produced electricity.
COAL
ONLINE
For more information on the anti-
coal train coalition, go to the Coalition
to Resist Coal Trains Through Eugene
Facebook page at http://wkly.ws/164
For the Sightline Institute’s lengthy
investigation into coal in the Northwest
go to http://wkly.ws/165
For a look at Balance Media’s video
on coal exports go to http://wkly.ws/f
10 JANUARY 19, 2012
EUGENE WEEKLY
Schlenker-Goodrich says, “The way to think about the
way electricity in the U.S. works at this time is that it relies
on huge centralized power plants typically in rural areas.” He
says the plants create regional haze and smog.
Even with Boardman moving away from coal (though
considering natural gas, another fossil fuel, as well as biofuel-
burning options) Oregon is still coal-dependent. “Turn on a
light bulb in Eugene and it could be from power produced in
Montana,” Schlenker-Goodrich says.
According to the Oregon Department of Energy, 37
percent of the electricity used in Oregon comes from coal,
some from Boardman and some from out-of-state power
plants such as Montana’s massive Colstrip plant. Recently
released EPA data on power plants says Colstrip was the
eighth biggest producer of greenhouse gas emissions in
2010, sending out 17,120,416 million metric tons of carbon
dioxide equivalent. In other words, a light bulb turned on in
Eugene might be creating greenhouse gases in Montana, as
well as poisoning the wells and lungs of the communities
near the plant.
Joe Harwood of the Eugene Water and Electric Board says
EWEB gets some of its power from BPA (Bonneville Power
Administration), and that “coal makes up makes up 6 percent
of EWEB’s power resource portfolio.” He adds, “EWEB and
every other utility in the Northwest that receives BPA power
would thus have some coal in their resource mix.”
According to EWEB’s electric resource portfolio,
the utility gets 52 percent of its electricity from BPA, and
Harwood says 76 percent of EWEB’s power resources come
from hydropower. So Eugene isn’t using much coal, though
it could have tons of coal coming through town.
“There is a lot of pressure on these aging coal-fi red
power plants and the economics are changing very rapidly,”
Schlenker-Goodrich says. In addition to many of the older
power plants such as Boardman being shut down, new
proposals for coal-burning plants are being shelved, and “you
have the coal mines saying ‘Well we still want to mine this
coal and sell it somewhere,’” he says.
That somewhere is Asia, and if the Coos Bay coal export
terminal goes through, Oregon will be the route that gets it
there.
Train in vain
Boardman burns 3 to 5 million tons of coal per year,
according to Stevens. “Compare that to how much coal they
want to export, and it’s scary,” she says.
The Coos Bay proposal calls for the exporting of 6 to
10 million tons a year. That’s bad enough for Eugene, but
Stevens points out that, while another coal export proposal
in Longview, Wash., was claiming it would export 5 million
tons a year, it was revealed that coal giant Ambre Energy,
through its subsidiary Millennium Bulk Terminals, secretly
planned to export 20 to 60 million tons of coal a year from
the proposed terminal, with at least 20 coal trains a day,
moving slowly, holding up traffi c, spewing diesel and coal
dust, according to Stevens. She says the heavy weight of
coal trains means they use a high amount of diesel.
There are fi ve other proposed Northwest coal terminals
in addition to Longview. Terminals have been proposed in
Bellingham and Grays Harbor in Washington, and in Oregon
there are proposals for terminals at ports in St. Helens and
Boardman and, of course, Coos Bay.
The Boardman proposal, like Longview, is through
Australian coal giant Ambre Energy. In addition to Ambre,
fellow coal mega-corps Arch Coal (which owns Millennium
with Ambre), Peabody Coal and Cloud Peak Energy are
working to export coal, or already do, mainly from the
Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming. Currently
that coal is exported through three terminals in Canada.
Power River Basin coal is in demand for its low sulfur
content. Climate change activist Bill McKibben has called
the basin “one of earth’s great carbon bombs.”
Peabody reportedly has entered into a large coal export
contract with the proposed Gateway Pacifi c Terminal project
north of Bellingham. Just who has entered into the coal
contract with Coos Bay remains unknown, thanks to the
nondisclosure agreement. Martin Callery, chief commercial
offi cer for the Port of Coos Bay, says such agreements are
common in the transportation industry, from rail to marine to
trucking. Because there’s a lot of competition, the companies
don’t want their competitors to know what they’re planning,
Callery says.
“I don’t think people realized it was going to come this
far south,” says Eugene activist Pettygrove. “We thought
that the port’s not deep enough, and the rail link was not up
until this year. I really think that them fi xing the rail link was
done to prepare for this project.”
Coal opponents speculate that the companies looking
to open up terminals in Oregon are the same ones working
on the Washington proposals — Arch, Ambre and Peabody
— and are hedging their bets in case those terminals don’t
pan out. Cloud Peak Energy, a top exporter of coal through
Canada, has several subsidiaries in Oregon: Kennecott Coal
Sales, Northern Coal Transportation, Prospect Land and
Development and Western Minerals.
Callery says that within the next 90 to 120 days, the
Port of Coos Bay will enter into a property-purchase
option agreement with “Project Mainstay,” at which point
the coal company’s name could become known. The port
and “Project Mainstay” are currently in the middle of six
months of “due diligence” on the project, he says, which
includes everything from looking at port capacity to rail-line
capacity. The port also owns the rail line, called the Coos
Bay Rail Link (CBRL).
Callery says a “dictating factor” in how much coal
would be exported from Coos Bay is the “volume of bulk
commodity via the rail system” or, in other words, how
many unit trains (that travel from start to fi nish as one unit)
the CBRL can handle. There is no legal limit on how long a
freight train can be in the U.S.; they are limited only by their
weight and what can pull them. Coal trains often have four
diesel-spewing locomotives, two at each end of the train.
Project Mainstay is currently doing a rail capacity study,
Callery says. He says the port didn’t choose the largest
project, it chose what it considered the best one. Another
proposal, “Project Glory,” which the port commission didn’t
choose, called to export 26 million metric tons of coal.
Callery says coal isn’t the only commodity Project
Mainstay is considering. It would also transport iron ore
and mineral products. “There would be a signifi cant number
of jobs” at the terminal, the rail carrier and in the maritime
industry, Callery says. The port’s export of wood products,
long one of its past mainstays, has dropped from fi ve million
tons a year to million and half, and jobs dropped with that.
But employment numbers are unknown until Mainstay
completes its due diligence, he says.
Black lungs
Maps indicate that the coal would be loaded onto trains
at the Powder River Basin mines in Montana and Wyoming,
taken through Montana into Washington, then through the
Columbia Gorge, down the rail line following the I-5 corridor
and into Eugene, where the trains would switch rails onto the
newly fi xed and reopened CBRL.
The CBRL moves west from Eugene toward Florence,
then down the coast through Reedsport to Coos Bay, crossing
through forests, past towns and over lakes and rivers on its
way. Stevens of the Sierra Club says that for humans, the
danger from coal dust is in its mercury, arsenic and lead,
which could lead to lung cancer and asthma as well as health
issues stemming from the small particulate matter that gets
into the lungs.
Lisa Arkin of Beyond Toxics has been working for years
on health issues related to train traffi c along River Road and
in the Trainsong area. Diesel exhaust, like coal dust, is bad
for your health. It releases carbon monoxide, sulfur oxides,
nitrogen oxides and polyaromatic hydrocarbons and their
derivatives, Arkin says.
Whatcom Docs, a group of 170 doctors organized
against the coal-export terminal in Bellingham, say that
diesel particulate matter is associated with increased risk of
cancer, pulmonary infl ammation and increased heart attacks
in adults, and increased asthma and hospital emissions in
children.
The doctors say the coal dust from the trains can lead
to chronic bronchitis, emphysema, pulmonary fi brosis and
environmental contamination through the leaching of toxic
heavy metals.
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