News from Mosier

Sewers shut off, water aquifers dry as Mosier deals with oil train derailment aftermath

By Casey Parks | The Oregonian/OregonLive

The town's sewer system remains shut off. And the aquifers are dry, leaving the city's 430 residents without water reserves on a day projected to hit record high temperatures.
Burns said she's hopeful crews can work up temporary fixes Sunday, but Mosier won't return to normal any time soon.
"If this isn't solved," she said, "we'll all have to move somewhere else."
Burns and public safety officials began warning residents Saturday not to flush their toilets.

City of Mosier, Small Enough to Make a Difference!
The City of Mosier has issued a press release.

Union Pacific Says It Plans to Restart Train Traffic Through Mosier Before Oil is Removed from Derailed Rail Cars Along Track:

City of Mosier Passes Emergency Motion Calling on UPRR to Remove All Oil from Damaged Cars Before Traffic Reopened

The City of Mosier held an emergency meeting this afternoon and passed a motion objecting to Union Pacific’s plans to restart train traffic while derailed oil cars, many still full of oil, sit just feet
from the tracks in severely damaged condition. The City is calling on Union Pacific, as well as Gov. Kate Brown andOregon’s Congressional delegation to:

1. Remove all oil from derailed cars prior to starting any train traffic in light of the risk of igniting the damaged oil train cars;
2. Complete the investigation determining what went wrong and have it fixed before any oil train or other high risk train traffic resumes.

“The City of Mosier strongly objects to Union Pacific’s plans to restart running trains, including oil trains, as early as tonight through the derailment site where damaged oil tankers
continue to sit feet from newly laid railroad track,” says Arlene Burns, Mayor, City of Mosier. “Restarting trains before the high-risk carnage of their last accident is even cleared from the
tracks is telling Mosier they are going to play a second round of Russian roulette without our town -it’s totally unacceptable.”

“Everyone wants to see train traffic restarted, but we are very concerned about the safety of our town. The new tracks will be no safer than before the derailment and now we have tens of thousands of gallons of oil sitting in damaged rail tankers just feet away from the proposed new active track,” says Mosier City Council President Emily Reed. “They do not yet know what happened in this section of track to cause the accident on Friday so on what basis can they safely re-start running oil trains down this same section of track? This is literally hundreds of feet from our homes and school.”

Mosier, Ore., moves to halt traffic on rail line after derailment

via Seattle Times, Mike Carter and Daniel Gilbert
Union Pacific Railroad says it appears some sort of track failure caused the derailment of 16 oil tanker cars near Mosier, Ore., causing the fire and oil spill.Officials in Mosier, Ore., are objecting to Union Pacific’s decision to restart train traffic after a fiery oil-car derailment Friday prompted an evacuation and disrupted the town’s sewage and water systems.
Arlene Burns, Mosier’s mayor, said that the City Council passed a resolution Sunday calling for Union Pacific to halt train traffic until the derailed cars are removed and the investigation into the incident is complete. The company resumed running trains Sunday evening.
“We just think it’s way too soon for them to resume business as usual,” Burns said in an interview. “It seems utterly unreasonable.”
Justin Jacobs, a spokesman for Union Pacific, said the company had repaired the track and would continue to inspect it through the night. “We’re absolutely aware of the concern, and we’ll continue to work with the city,” he said, adding that trains are running at reduced speeds of 10 mph through Mosier as a precaution.



Oil train derails, catches fire in Columbia River GorgeOregon officials said Sunday night that an evacuation order had been lifted for Mosier residents, and the city’s wastewater treatment plant was operating after the removal of 10,000 gallons of oil. Residents can flush toilets but are still being asked to boil water for drinking.Earlier Sunday, Greg Svelund, a spokesman with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), said that “Investigators had discovered that the Mosier wastewater- treatment plant and sewer lines were nonoperational as a result of damage from the train derailment.”
Oregon environmental officials think they’ve contained oil that was leaking into the Columbia River from the derailed cars.
Sixteen tank cars, part of a 96-car train operated by Union Pacific railroad, derailed Friday. Four of the cars erupted in flames and burned until Saturday morning. A small quantity of oil leaked into the Columbia River, but that has been contained by booms, officials said Sunday.

Hundreds Turned Away at Tacoma Methanol Scoping Hearing

Proposed methanol plant draws debate at Tacoma hearing

via The News Tribune BY DERRICK NUNNALLY

A contentious hearing Thursday night to guide official scrutiny of a proposed Tideflats methanol plant drew hundreds more people than a 400-seat meeting room in the Greater Tacoma Convention & Trade Center could hold, leaving city officials pondering Friday how to handle future hearings.
“We are going to fix this next time,” said Ian Munce, the city’s principal planner and manager of the methanol project. “We are going to the ballroom next time.”
The meeting room used for Thursday’s event, instead of the 1,200-capacity ballroom, resulted in a meeting that started an hour ahead of schedule, after all seats were filled and the room’s perimeter was lined by the project’s advocates and detractors jammed together into close proximity.

The hearing was the first public meeting since the Port of Tacoma agreed in 2014 on a 30-year lease of waterfront property to build the 125-acre methanol production facility, which would be the world’s largest.The project’s proposer, Northwest Innovation Works, draws financial support from China’s government and BP (the British petroleum company), and also plans to build two similar plants in Kalama and the Port of St. Helens in Clatskanie, Oregon.

Several cited troubling problematic consequences of Tacoma’s industrial past, including the much-mocked “Tacoma aroma” and the lead and arsenic that fell from the Asarco copper smelter smokestack into Tacoma’s soils for much of the 20th century.
“Yes, we need jobs,” said Bruce Hoeft, a retired teacher who lives in Tacoma, “but we need ones that will not threaten the health of the people who have those jobs and the people who live nearby. … The smelter also provided those jobs, and it poisoned the land and the water.”

Enormous Northwest refineries would feed China exclusively

David Ferris, E&E reporter

EnergyWire: Tuesday, November 17, 2015

SEATTLE -- China is seeking to tap the flood of cheap natural gas coming from the interior of North America by converting it to methanol at three huge refineries in Washington and Oregon.
The processing plants, collectively called Northwest Innovation Works, have received little attention despite their head-snapping impact:

• The refineries could increase demand for natural gas in the Pacific Northwest by 40 percent.

• They would more than triple the size of the fast-growing U.S. methanol industry.

• With an estimated $7 billion price tag, the refineries would be one of the largest investments ever by China in new U.S. manufacturing.

• The largest plant, planned for Tacoma, could use more water than all the residential customers of the city's public utility district combined.

Sign this petition! 

Say NO to the huge methanol refinery proposed for the heart of Tacoma

City of Tacoma has the links to Scoping and the comment portal. There will be a second hearing Tuesday, February 16, 2016, 6:30 PM, at Meeker Middle School, 4402 Nassau Avenue NE.

For more info see:

Citizens for a Healthy Bay 

Red Line Tacoma

NATURAL GAS: Enormous Northwest refineries would feed China exclusively

China would build the world's largest methanol refinery at this site in the Port of Tacoma, where an aluminum smelter once stood. Photo courtesy of Northwest Innovation Works.

Northwest Innovation Works guesses its Tacoma plant would use roughly 10,000 gallons [of water] per minute, and perhaps more.

 

NATURAL GAS:  Enormous Northwest refineries would feed China exclusively

David Ferris, E&E reporter   EnergyWire: Tuesday, November 17, 2015

SEATTLE -- China is seeking to tap the flood of cheap natural gas coming from the interior of North America by converting it to methanol at three huge refineries in Washington and Oregon.

The processing plants, collectively called Northwest Innovation Works, have received little attention despite their head-snapping impact:

• The refineries could increase demand for natural gas in the Pacific Northwest by 40 percent.

• They would more than triple the size of the fast-growing U.S. methanol industry.

• With an estimated $7 billion price tag, the refineries would be one of the largest investments ever by China in new U.S. manufacturing.

• The largest plant, planned for Tacoma, could use more water than all the residential customers of the city's public utility district combined.

"This is really a cross-Pacific collaboration," said Simon Zhang, the project's CEO and a former official with BP who is based in Shanghai. "It's very unique in that it brings a benefit to both sides of the Pacific very clearly."

However, the plan is being viewed warily by Pacific Northwest environmental groups, which have proved effective at slowing a long list of proposals to deliver coal, oil and natural gas from the continent's midsection to hungry markets in Asia.

"They fit into the pattern of more fossil-fuel infrastructure built on the Columbia that we have concerns about," said Brett VandenHeuvel, the executive director of Columbia Riverkeeper. Two of the three refineries would sit on the banks of the Columbia River.

The Chinese proposal, first made public last year, is different from other projects that would export raw fossil fuels. First, the end goal is methanol, a crucial building block of plastic and many other materials of modern life. Second, China would be the sole recipient.

Third is that it aims to lower greenhouse gas emissions in China, while raising them to a lesser degree on American shores. China is the world's largest producer and consumer of methanol, and it manufactures almost all of it from coal, which creates a great deal of carbon emissions.

Reducing carbon emissions across industries is an increasingly urgent goal for China, which will be a key player at the Paris climate talks at the end of this month. In September, China announced it would establish a carbon-trading market by 2017.

The Pacific Northwest venture claims that using natural gas instead would reduce emissions by 70 percent, and that it will employ a new technique that reduces the carbon footprint even further.
Northwest Innovation Works says the three refineries would create 3,000 construction jobs and 460 permanent jobs. It could spawn new customers for natural gas in the Pacific Northwest, where industrial jobs have been on the wane. The proposal has received an enthusiastic endorsement from Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D).

The factories would also use enormous quantities of water, an obvious selling point for China and a potential flashpoint in the Pacific Northwest. China has chronic water shortages, while Washington and Oregon have lots of it -- though that supply is in question as climate change reduces the region's snowpack.

Two of the refineries would sit on opposite banks of the Columbia River, one in Clatskanie, Ore., about an hour's drive northwest of Portland, and the other at the Port of Kalama in Washington state. Both would produce about 5,000 metric tons of methanol a day, which would put them on par with the world's largest methanol plants.

But both would be dwarfed by a third proposed refinery at Tacoma, a busy industrial port a half-hour south of Seattle. Double the size of the other two, it would be the largest methanol refinery ever built.

 

Cheap gas fires up U.S. methanol

The new refineries would bring an even steeper growth curve to an already fast-growing methanol industry in the United States.

Methanol, also known as methyl alcohol or wood alcohol, is a precursor to hundreds of products, from plastics to fabrics to paints to windshield wiper fluid. The Washington and Oregon projects, like other plants, would combine natural gas with steam and heat to make a synthesis gas of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and hydrogen. That gas is heated and compressed and run over a catalyst to make a crude methanol, and then it is distilled with water.

The resulting methanol -- colorless, flammable, and a liquid at atmospheric temperature -- would be shipped to China, where it would be converted into olefins, such as ethylene and propylene, and used to make a range of products.....   read more here

Governor Inslee: Green "Hero" or "Zero"?

As posted recently on this Blog, [Inslee admin meets secretly with Longview refinery lobbyists  ] the Governor's staff has met frequently with promoters of the proposed Riverside Energy refinery in Longview.  While he maintains a posture as a "green" advocate for renewable/clean energy, Governor Inslee appears to have much greater and more frequent contact with the Fossil Fuel Industry.
 
Representatives of labor, community and environmental organizations from around the state, organized as the Solidarity Roundtable on Oil, have attempted to meet with Inslee and staff to voice their concerns since last year. When a meeting eventually happened on 03/31/15, two members of Governor Inslee's Cabinet met with them to discuss their concerns.  Rob Duff, Senior Policy Advisor to Governor Inslee, decided not to attend the meeting.

What follows below is the letter sent to Mr. Duff and Department of Ecology directors just prior to the meeting. No actual results of this meeting have been forthcoming. 

It's probably time for Governor Inslee to come out from behind the "green curtain."

cwr
 
    ***

March 30, 2015

TO: Rob Duff, Senior Policy Advisor to Governor Inslee

Maia D. Bellon, Director, Washington State Department of Ecology

Denise Clifford, Director of Governmental Relations, Department of Ecology

Dr. Kathy Taylor, Shorelands and Environmental Assistance Program, Department of Ecology

FROM: Solidarity Roundtable on Oil (Delegation)

Kelly Fox, President, Washington State Council on Fire Fighters

Laura Ackerman, Oil Policy Advisor, The Lands Council, Spokane

Bruce Amundson, President, Washington State Physicians for Social Responsibility, Seattle

Cager Clabaugh, President, ILWU Local 4, Vancouver

Diane Dick, President, Landowners and Citizens for a Safe Community, Longview

Tom Glade, President, Evergreen Islands, Inc. Anacortes

Arthur R.D. Grunbaum, President, Friends of Grays Harbor, Aberdeen

Don Steinke, Coordinator, Sierra Club of SW Washington, Vancouver

Larry Thevik, Vice President, Washington Dungeness Crab Fisherman's Association, Westport

Re: Our Requests for Executive Action: Discussion and Response to our letters to Governor Inslee, November 21^st and March 16^th.

Monday, March 30^th at 1:30 pm. WSCFF Conference Room, 1069 Adams St. SE Olympia

Thanks very much to Governor Inslee and to each of you for meeting with us to discuss our letter and its requests for executive action.

As our letters to Governor Inslee state, we are “opposed to the proposed oil terminals in Grays Harbor and Vancouver and to the expansion of oil refineries in Washington State, including the Shell oil refinery in Anacortes” and we look to the Governor's executive action in this regard.

At this point, we would like Governor Inslee to take the following executive actions:

Add his voice to local, state and Congressional voices calling on Matt Rose (BNSF) and Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway) to get these dangerous oil tank cars (DOT 111s & CPC 1232s) off the rail road tracks that endanger the three million Washington residents living in the blast zone.

Join us in publicly opposing the siting of oil terminals in Vancouver (Nustar) and in Grays Harbor (Westway, Imperium and US Development).

The Governor's current semi-judicial relationship to the EFSEC decision on Tesoro/Savage does not prevent his public opposition to these four terminals. The Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility has stated its opposition to the siting of any such facilities in Washington state population centers. These proposed terminals also threaten Eastern Washington cities, like Spokane, whose EPA designated sole-source drinking water aquifer intersects with BNSF rail lines, oil pipelines and mingles in places with the Spokane River. We need all the downline impacts in eastern Washington thoroughly studied including traffic, greenhouse gas emissions and diesel particulate matter.

Direct his EFSEC Chair, Bill Lynch, to respond to the systematic circumvention of EFSEC review authority by oil companies proposing a series of oil terminals each technically below the threshold, but cumulatively above the threshold, such as in Grays Harbor. These are likely to engage in project creep such as what Global Partners did in Clatskanie, Oregon by quickly exceeding throughput by 400% and paying a fine of pennies per tank car.

Direct his EFSEC chair Bill Lynch and Ecology to include a Health Impact Assessment for its fossil fuel projects, to include in its reviews recent revelations with regard to oil train fires and spills and to insist on a 120 day comment period after a DEIS is published and that SEPA be applied to the full extent of the law.

Direct Ecology to become the lead agency in the EIS process currently mandated for the Shell oil refinery rail expansion project at March Point, Anacortes, and with the NuStar proposal in Vancouver. As a result of the Swinomish Supreme Court decision, Skagit County is disinclined to work with Ecology in developing the Shell EIS. Consequently, the Governor must intervene to require Ecology to assume the role of lead agency.

Direct his Transportation Secretary, Lynn Peterson, and Ecology Director, Maia Bellon, to require environmental assessments for all rail infrastructure improvement projects within the state to include thorough evaluation of all potential and cumulative impacts, short and long-term, caused by increased rail infrastructure capacity by all rail users of those projects, both freight and passenger. To revisit the November 2010 Finding of No Significant Impact for the Pacific Northwest Rail Corridor, projects utilizing state and federal ARRA funds, to ensure remaining projects assess the cumulative and projected environmental impacts of increased freight train capacity, not just improved passenger rail service on which the projects were justified. To assess the private versus public benefits of infrastructure improvements for all rail and highway projects under the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program (STIP).

Direct his FMSIB Chair, Dan Gatchet, and other state agencies (especially Ecology) to fully support a SEPA requirement for wide area cumulative impacts of proposals that studies the nexus between the extraction, transport, refining, use of fossil fuels, oil spills, inadequate spill response and, among other things, increased ocean acidification. Specifically, Governor Inslee should tell Mr. Gatchet that he rejects the suggestion in the May 2014 Advisory Committee report that SEPA review be restricted to the project site.

Direct his UTC Chair, David Danner, to impose on BNSF the full allowable fine of $700,000 for the railroad's 700 violations of state regulations which occurred between November 1, 2014 and February 24, 2015.

Direct his legislative staff to support the inclusion of minimum train crew language in the conference session reconciling Senator Ericksen's (5057) and Representative Farrell's (1449) bills. BNSF's efforts to enforce a one-person crew on these 120 car unit trains is a direct threat to our communities, regardless of their cargo.

We look forward to our discussion on Monday and to Governor Inslee's Executive Actions.