The Oct. 15 derailment near Pueblo spilled mountains of coal over I-25, collapsed a bridge, and killed a truck driver. This was tragic, but it could have been much worse. It could have been a two-mile-long train filled with crude oil–the kind that the Uinta Basin Railway would send through Colorado up to five times a day.
The Pueblo tragedy confirms that hauling hazardous materials by the trainload always involves severe risk. The Pueblo tragedy warrants a second look at a guest commentary that appeared in the August 14 Denver Post. There, Julius T. Murray, speaking for his Ute Indian Tribe, urged federal taxpayers to finance the railway to make up for historical mistreatment of his tribe by the federal government.
The railway would connect Uinta Basin oil fields to the Union Pacific’s main line in Utah. From there, trains would wind through Colorado’s treacherous mountain passes and follow the Colorado River for over 100 miles before heading to the Front Range and points east. It would quadruple production of Uinta oil by making it cheaper to ship it to refineries along the Gulf Coast, increasing the royalties collected by the Ute tribe.
Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper and Gov. Jared Polis oppose federal financing of these potential oil “bomb trains,” which would cross Colorado’s most at-risk ecosystems daily. Mr. Murray says this opposition is unfair because the federal government treated his tribe unfairly in the past. Past abuses of his tribe are real and tragic, but they cannot be atoned for by abusing Colorado’s environment in the present.
While Mr. Murray reveres the Colorado mountains from which his people were moved long ago, he dismisses the threats to those same mountains which these oil trains pose — both the threat that inevitable derailments could ignite wildfires in Colorado’s inaccessible timbered canyons or spill crude oil into the Colorado River, and the certainty that burning these fossil fuels will worsen Colorado’s climate. He rightly laments that his people were moved from Colorado to the arid infertile Utah plateau where they now reside. Regarding heat, drought, and infertility, however, the plateau on which he lives “ain’t seen nothing yet” as the climate catastrophe from burning fossil fuels accelerates.
Central to Mr. Murray’s charge of unfairness is his claim that these oil trains pose little environmental risk because they will transport crude oil as a harmless solid that couldn’t ignite a fire or leak into the Colorado River if a train derailed. This was a favorite talking point of Keith Heaton, the railway’s chief spokesman, until a reporter asked him how he knew that. Mr. Heaton admitted that he didn’t know, conceding that private shippers would decide whether to transport the railway’s crude as a hot liquid or a solid, whichever is cheaper.
Based on cost, their choice will likely be hot liquid. That is how Uinta waxy crude emerges from the well. It is customarily shipped in insulated tanker trucks or railcars designed to keep it that way until it reaches the refinery. Shippers bear this extra expense because allowing Uinta waxy crude to cool and congeal clogs and corrodes any metal container it is put in. Over time, a system that routinely handles Uinta waxy crude as a solid would become a maintenance nightmare, which explains why it is rarely attempted.
The Uinta Basin already violates the EPA’s ozone standards, due mostly to oil and gas activity on reservation lands. If, as expected, building the railway quadruples that activity, it would increase ozone levels as well. Much of that extra ozone would drift downwind over Colorado’s Front Range, harming the health of its residents as well.
Threatening the environment of Utah and Colorado while putting the health of their residents at risk is not the way to make Mr. Murray’s people whole.
Malin Moench, a Utah resident, spent 37 years analyzing the economics of public utilities and logistics at the federal level. Now retired, he volunteers for organizations focusing on environmental integrity and public health.
