Donna Gerardi Riordan, Co-founder of Orcas NO COALition (nocoalition.net) yesterday sent word out to NO COALition members: “Terrific news about an important victory today in Oregon! The bottom line is this: pipeline/terminal company Kinder Morgan has decided not to pursue a proposal to build a coal terminal on the Columbia River.”
Tankers crossing in Haro Strait. Photo courtesy of Shawna Franklin and nocoalition.net
By Floyd McKay
for Crosscut.com
Thirty millions tons of coal a year were taken off the region’s export board Wednesday when the pipeline and terminals giant Kinder Morgan announced that it would no longer pursue a major coal terminal at the Port of St. Helens on Oregon’s Columbia River shore.
The announcement came quickly at a regular meeting of the Port of St. Helens, as Allen Fore, a Kinder Morgan spokesman, made a brief statement that the company’s “due diligence” had turned up site issues that made the site unfeasible. The Port was in the midst of an effort to rezone some 957 acres of open land from agriculture to industrial use to allow Kinder-Morgan to build a terminal. The facility would have shipped from 15 to 30 million tons of coal a year brought by rail from the Powder River Basin.
No originating coal company had been named. The plan by Kinder Morgan, which bills itself as one of the North America’s three largest energy firms, called for coal to be loaded onto ships bound for Asia. But Kinder Morgan remains nterested in being part of the rush to export coal to China from the United States.
The so-called “site issues” did not include a general pushback in the region against coal exports and the trains that carry the coal, Fore told commissioners. But the previous night a large and clearly anti-terminal crowd turned up at a county hearing on the rezoning proposal. “We wanted to be sure it wasn’t going to be a rubber-stamp deal and if it was, it would be appealed,” Darrel Whipple of Alston told Crosscut.
Whipple lives between two small Oregon towns that would be heavily impacted by perhaps a dozen coal trains a day if the terminal is built. City councils in Rainier and Clatskanie have raised objections to the project.
“Opposition has grown as people become more aware of the guaranteed impact along the rail line of the five cities that will be split along the rail line,” said Whipple, who is active in Clean Columbia County, a citizen group opposing the export terminal.
(To read the full story go to: crosscut.com/2013/05/09/coal-ports/114379/mckay-k-m-out-st-helens)
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Thanks for all your work on this issue Donna.
I’ll be looking for clues as to whether Kinder Morgan’s abandoning the Port of St. Helens indicates increased pressure for success at GPT / Cherry Point, WA, or whether KM is re-examining it’s entire coal export business plan.