Army Corps of Engineers

Thu, 2012-09-20 12:44Ben Jervey
Ben Jervey's picture

Army Corps Fast Tracks Port of Morrow Coal Export Terminal

The Army Corps of Engineers has decided that the transfer of coal from trains onto barges in Oregon’s Columbia River is not worthy of a full environmental impact study. For now.

At issue is the Morrow Pacific Project, a coal transfer facility that is a key pivot point in Ambre Energy’s plans to export American coal to Asia. We’ve covered this project before (here's all the background on the Morrow Pacific Project), as well as the broader strategy of coal companies to ship American coal -- much coming from taxpayer-owned public lands -- off to China and other overseas buyers.

Basically, Ambre Energy (an Australian coal and shale company) is planning on shipping coal by train from the strip mines in the Powder River Basin to this Morrow Pacific facility at the Port of Morrow in Boardman, Oregon. There the coal would be offloaded onto barges -- at the rate of two per day at full capacity -- which would then float down the Columbia River to Port Westward (roughly 30 miles north of Portland), where it would again be transferred onto massive Panamax vessels for shipment to Asia.

Read more: Army Corps Fast Tracks Port of Morrow Coal Export Terminal
Wed, 2012-06-06 08:36Steve Horn
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TransCanada's Latest Extreme Energy Export Pipelines in the U.S. and Canada

TransCanada was once in the limelight and targeted for its Keystone XL pipeline project. Now, with few eyes watching, it is pushing along two key pipeline projects that would bring two respective forms of what energy geopolitics scholar Michael Klare calls "extreme energy" to lucrative export markets.

Pipeline one: the southern segment of the originally proposed TransCanada Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, popularly referred to as the Cushing Extension, but officially referred to as either the Gulf Coast Project or the Cushing Marketlink pipeline. This pipeline will carry tar sands crude, or "dilbit," extracted from Alberta, Canada's Athabasca oil sands project southward first to Cushing, Oklahoma, and then to Port Arthur, Texas, where it will be shipped off to global export markets.

While the northern Alberta-to-Cushing segment has been punted until after election season by President Barack Obama's U.S. State Department, the Cushing-Port Arthur segment has been rammed through in a secrective manner by various Obama regulatory agencies, as pointed out recently by Friends of the Earth-U.S. (FOE-U.S.). 

FOE-U.S. explained in a long blog post published on June 5, well worth reading in its entirity,

Read more: TransCanada's Latest Extreme Energy Export Pipelines in the U.S. and Canada
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