— by Floyd McKay for Crosscut.com —
An Oregon agency created a major setback Monday [August 18] for plans to build a complex coal project on the Columbia River upstream from Portland.
The Department of State Lands (DSL) denied a removal-fill permit for a small area of state-regulated waters on a site along the Columbia River where Ambre Energy would place parts of a dock and conveyor system used to transfer coal. The system would unload coal from Union Pacific rail cars to dry land storage on the Port of Morrow at Boardman, about 160 miles east of Portland.
From the storage area, the coal would be loaded onto Columbia River barges and shipped downstream past Portland to the Port of St. Helens for transfer to ocean-going ships bound for Asia. The transfer-of-coal project has been in the works since 2011, and has had eight extensions of its DSL permits. Other permits are still pending with the Corps of Engineers and Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.
The DSL permit may make those other permit decisions moot — or not. Ambre spokesperson Liz Fuller responded in an email, “We disagree with this decision. We are evaluating our next steps, and considering the full range of legal and permitting options.”
(To read the full article, go to crosscut.com/2014/08/18/coal-export-plan-suffer-setback-oregon )
Thanks also to the OrcasNoCOALition.net
