What does Portland's plan for new fossil fuel operations mean for the Columbia River Gorge and beyond?
In September, Mayor Charlie Hales announced that he had a new customer at the Port of Portland – the Pembina Corporation. Pembina, based in Canada, plans to build a $500 million propane terminal at the port, potentially marking the first time the city of Portland enters the fossil fuel export business.
The mayor champions the proposal as the single largest investment in the city’s history, and one that could support up to 40 jobs. But entertaining this proposal seems to mark a symbolic shift for the region, and adds to several fossil fuel proposals already slated for the Columbia River gorge. Opponents say these projects threaten to undo decades of work to restore the ecological relationships of the Columbia River, including its salmon runs, and will exacerbate climate changes already harming our region. They also point to the recent spate of spectacular oil train derailments, noting that transporting propane will only multiply these risks.
For their part, company spokespeople have attempted to brand propane as a different kind of fossil fuel, locked in an existential and perhaps even eco-friendly battle with the dirty fossil fuels. Proponents have also claimed that the kind of accidents seen in the media will not happen in Portland due to the company’s vigilance and safety policies.
In December, the White House made matters even more confusing, labeling Portland a “climate champion.” As time goes on, however, the claims of both safety and climate-neutrality are becoming harder to believe.
Just this week, a conference in Olympia, Wash., was organized by Railroad Workers United and the Backbone Campaign, putting railworkers, environmentalists, and firefighters together to share information and concerns about the safety of fossil fuels moving by rail. At Evergreen State College’s longhouse, rail workers revealed to a stunned audience of 100 people that the average train operator suffers chronic exhaustion and sleep deprivation. At least one worker in attendance reported being asked to move an oil train with inadequate rest, with full knowledge they would be disciplined or fired for refusing. In an effort to cut costs and move products efficiently, worker reports of safety hazards are also routinely downplayed or ignored, leaving them with little confidence in their own safety, let alone the communities affected by accidents. With trains already up to a mile long, the two train operators onboard the front of a train can’t even see if the back is on fire. Despite this, companies have pushed to reduce crew size. Rail workers at the conference demanded the maintenance of two-person crews, and an end to draconian attendance policies that put exhausted workers and the general public at risk.
In August 2011, when a single propane tanker with a capacity of 29,000 gallons caught fire in Lincoln, Calif., the local fire chief Dave Whitt compared the blaze to a small thermonuclear bomb.
If Pembina can convince Portland’s Planning and Sustainability Commission that the company can safely move a daily load of 1.6 million gallons of liquid propane via train through Portland, the Commission will give a green light to the zoning change they need to construct a pipeline, and city councilors are likely to adopt their recommendation. This is probably the toughest hurdle in the permitting process, and with it out of the way, the terminal is likely to open for business in 2018 – supplied by a fleet of mile-long propane trains passing through Portland and gorge communities daily.
On March 10, the Port of Longview denied a similar propane proposal in a 3-0 decision. One project critic in Longview accused the company of taking “short cuts” on safety discussions, with company officials disregarding questions of train safety. Diane Dick, a county resident for 30 years, said that train safety was her main concern – something the company could not guarantee. “Every 100-car propane train carries the energy equivalent of 3 atom bombs – they don’t call them bomb trains for nothing,” Dick said. “I don’t want this for Longview or for Portland, and I certainly don’t want the propane trains or river tankers clogging river traffic and endangering our river,” she added.
Portland’s Planning and Sustainability Commission announced that Pembina had failed to meet its deadline for submitting critical safety information at the end of February, forcing it to shift a public hearing three weeks back to April 7. Public comments will be accepted from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. at 1900 SW 4th Ave, Suite 2500.
With the defeat in Longview and local delays in producing credible safety information, the company’s ability to overcome safety concerns appears to be slipping. On Feb. 27 the Northwest Citizen Science Initiative released a study noting that a potential explosion at the Pembina facility would be lethal within a one-mile radius, and would generate enough force to rupture eardrums and shatter glass across an area of nearly six miles, with high-speed shrapnel flying across an even larger area. This projection was based on a train accident or an earthquake that ignites 1 million gallons of propane. The storage tanks proposed by Pembina would hold more than 33 million.
For many Portlanders, Pembina is serving as an introduction to an even more alarming fossil fuel profile for the region. Rising Tide, a volunteer network of climate change activists that has organized Pembina since September, has been busy teaching people about similar proposals in the region.
“The Pacific Northwest is already slated to build 27 fossil fuel export terminals – an unprecedented rush that puts our communities and our planet in jeopardy,” says Caroline Hudson of Portland Rising Tide. “We have enough trouble with oil and coal terminals breaking the law, and threatening our climate, our salmon, and the reserved treaty rights of our indigenous peoples. We cannot afford another explosive fossil fuel threatening our communities and our planet.”
Rising Tide recently produced a map documenting all such terminals and their shipping routes in the Pacific Northwest, and is calling for a moratorium on all new fossil fuel infrastructure – including pipelines, refinery expansions, and export terminals.
Last August, the Oregon Department of State Lands denied a permit for a coal terminal in Boardman after local tribes testified that it was planned on top of a traditional fishing site. Ambre Energy, a company based in Australia, responded that the tribes were confused about where they fished – a claim that did not impress local tribal members or state officials. Over 20,000 people submitted comments to the governor’s office, opposing the terminal.
The battle over Pembina and its propane proposal, like other regional fossil fuel terminals, appears to highlight deeply divergent cultural perspectives not just on climate change, but also on the Columbia River. On the one side are environmental groups and tribal members who argue that the river is most valuable as a living entity, and that it is improved when we maintain continuity with its past, and when its salmon and ecological relationships are restored. To them, the risk of a spill or explosion is not worth the money, and represents a stacking of new risks on old mistakes. On the other side are state officials focusing narrowly on economic impact, including Port Director Bill Wyatt, who told the Portland Business Journal that a propane terminal would “add immense value to the Columbia River” as it would raise the urgency of navigation projects and channel maintenance. To this side, the river is an economic opportunity whose health and value can be measured by its ability to deliver multi-million dollar contracts. Each perspective on the river seems to have a complementary approach to climate change, just as the changing climate itself is a reflection of landscapes altered – and risks taken – for cheap energy and raw materials.
But when it comes to the Columbia’s future, tribal members hold many of the cards, and they appear no more excited by propane than by coal. They are especially concerned by the company’s treatment of indigenous peoples. Tribal elder Cathy Sampson-Kruse and other members of the Walla Walla in Eastern Oregon say they stand in solidarity with the Unist’ot’en encampment, a permanent blockade of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation in Canada that is shutting down illegal pipelines from Pembina and other energy corporations. They also say they stand “against Pembina and the Port of Portland who are pushing to build a propane export terminal on our beautiful Nichi’Wana, the Columbia River.” Cathy and her father, hereditary Walla Walla Chief Carl Sampson, both made national headlines as fierce resisters of tar sands extraction last winter, organizing opposition to tar sands “megaloads” moving through their territory in Eastern Oregon. The million pound megaload trucks, which span the length of a football field, were successfully blocked by tribal members and Portland Rising Tide activists to stop them from supporting tar sands extraction.
“We know Pembina is one of the biggest investors in the Alberta tar sands,” Cathy says.
Opposition to the tar sands and companies profiting from them has recently become a major rallying cry for indigenous and environmental activists. Opposition to megaloads spread rapidly in the fall of 2013 after the Nez Perce (or Nimiipuu) Tribe in Idaho repeatedly blocked shipments and then filed an injunction to stop them from crossing their traditional lands. According to Julian Matthews of Nimiipuu Protecting the Environment, opposition to tar sands shipments reached a breaking point when the Nez Perce were visited by indigenous peoples near the Alberta tar sands fields. Nimiipuu Protecting the Environment is now working to carry that energy forward to create environmental justice for tribes in the region. It is calling for the removal of four dams on the Snake River, and for an alliance of tribal and environmental groups to oppose fossil fuels and demand restoration of the Columbia River.
Pembina is the largest pipeline company in the Alberta tar sands, and one of the largest investors in its extraction. The massive disturbance to landscapes and cultures that attend tar sands extraction has become notorious for breaking both environmental laws and indigenous treaty rights. In addition to being the largest driver of deforestation on the planet, it is widely seen as the new face of colonialism threatening indigenous peoples in Canada. In 2012, opposition to tar sands extraction unleashed an unprecedented wave of indigenous resistance under the banner Idle No More, which saw indigenous activists forming round dances, drum circles, and blockades on railroads, highways and shopping malls across the nation. The extraction of heavy tar sands oil, activists claimed, was poisoning indigenous peoples and their cultural resources – in violation of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and breaking federally protected treaty rights to fish, hunt, and gather in accustomed places.
The epicenter of tar sands extraction in Canada is Alberta, a landscape once lush with old-growth boreal forests that is now likened to the surface of the moon, or the orc pits of Mordor. According to data provided by the Energy Resources Conservation Board, Pembina has spilled at least 34 million liters of oil in at least 336 distinct spills between 1975 and 2013 – an average of nearly a million liters per year for 38 consecutive years. The poisons from such spills have caused massive spikes in birth defects, rare forms of cancer, and mass-deaths of plant and animal life. In September 2000, a Pembina pipeline ruptured near the town of Chetwynd, spilling 1 million liters of oil into the Pine River, forcing the town to find a new source of drinking water. One local said the scene along the river was “silent as a tomb… no birds, not even any insects. There is no animal life at all.”
Propane for the Portland terminal would be supplied by Natural Gas Liquids (NGL’s) refined in Pembina’s Redwater facility in Alberta. The company’s website says Redwater receives NGL’s from “various natural gas and NGL producers”, and the company acknowledges that much of this is extracted via fracking – a process that creates fractures in the Earth using huge volumes of high-pressure liquids whose contents are considered an industry secret, and which leave incredibly large bodies of water unsafe to drink. Research from Columbia University and the U.S. Geological Survey indicates that fracking and the injection of waste-water into underground “disposal wells” has triggered batches of earthquakes in Ohio, Colorado and Oklahoma, and was apparently responsible for Oklahoma’s largest earthquake on record in 2011. Natural Gas Liquids are also derived from crude oil “stabilization”, a process that removes volatile gases before shipment to reduce the risk of ignition or explosion – a cost many producers in North Dakota want to continue skipping in the midst of their “historic oil boom”.
Official statements from the mayor and the Port of Portland have celebrated Pembina’s proposal as a kind of economic miracle, or otherwise as a kind of goldilocks fossil fuel that fits eco-conscious Portlanders like a glass slipper – not too dirty (coal), and not too sticky (oil): just clean enough. Port director Bill Wyatt even says it makes “a good climate story because it displaces much dirtier fuels,” a statement that works best when the word “story” is emphasized. The obvious connections to ethically questionable and environmentally destructive practices within the same company seem to be intentionally overlooked, as are numerous local proposals that magnify risk, such as the massive oil-by-rail proposal in Vancouver, Wash., that would ship 360,000 barrels per day through the Columbia Gorge. These projects do not displace each other, but they do draw fierce criticism from local residents.
In March last year, Global Partners was fined $117,292 for shipping nearly six times more oil by rail at their Clatskanie facility than their operating permit allowed. All of the oil moved through this terminal was done virtually in secret – the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality allowed Global Partners to move oil trains through the Columbia Gorge with no public hearing and no public comment. Local residents joined a blockade of the facility shortly after the fines were announced, calling for an end to oil by rail. Many of these oil-carrying “bomb trains” have been spotted traveling through Portland and Seattle, despite warnings from the National Transportation Safety Board that they should avoid urban areas since the accident at Lec-Mégantic, Quebec. In July 2013, an oil train that derailed in downtown Lec-Mégantic incinerated 47 people and half of the city’s downtown area. Last July, a train carrying 100 cars of crude oil derailed while traveling at 5 mph in downtown Seattle, but luckily did not spill or ignite. That month, officials with the Columbia Gorge Commission passed a resolution calling on the governors of Washington and Oregon to pass a moratorium on new fossil fuel movements through the Columbia Gorge, citing the risk of a catastrophic incident.
On April 7, the Planning and Sustainability Commission will hold what may be the last public meeting to determine the fate of the Pembina proposal, and has asked specifically for testimony from local tribal members. Consultation with tribal members, plus the safety concerns of local residents, will likely be the deciding factor in the commission’s vote. Even if the zoning change and attendant permits are approved, however, the fight will not be over: Local climate activists have pledged to wage civil disobedience against the terminal. As many are learning, one does not simply accept the title of “Climate Champion” and then build a fossil fuel terminal in Portland.
