Five environmental groups and a Colorado county joined forces to stop the construction of a new rail line in northeastern Utah and oppose federal approval of the line.
A lawsuit filed against the federal government seeks to halt the project, claiming the Uinta Basin Railroad will bring potential hazards through Colorado.
Eagle County – plus the Center for Biological Diversity, Living Rivers, Sierra Club, Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, and WildEarth Guardians – filed opening briefs on Aug. 18 in a lawsuit against the federal Surface Transportation Board before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.
The effort to build the railway has been discussed for many years. In 2018, the Seven Counties Infrastructure Coalition – comprised of Carbon, Daggett, Duchesne, Emery, San Juan, Sevier, and Uintah counties – applied for a $27.9 million grant from the State of Utah for planning and preconstruction work.
Under the proposal the 85-mile-long rail line would run southwest along U.S. Highway 191 from Duchesne to near Price, Utah. That route would allow up to 10 oil trains a day to access the national railway network, including the Union Pacific Railroad Colorado Central Corridor from Grand Junction to Denver, according to the coalition.
The objections started immediately, with critics saying the project would harm endangered species, increase fire danger and increase global warming.
In late September 2021, the 3rd District Court in Salt Lake City denied a petition for summary judgment filed by Living Rivers and Center for Biological Diversity, which objected to the planning grants on procedural grounds and argued the project would “impermissibly increase oil production in the region.”
The court dismissed this claim, ruling that federal policy requires “the public lands be managed in a manner which recognizes the nation‘s need for domestic sources of minerals, food, timber, and fiber from the public lands.”
“We have been fighting this proposed railway since it was first announced as a project. We're tremendously concerned about the carbon emissions that will come from the increased oil and gas production that the railway is predicated on,” Deeda Seed, senior public lands campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity, told The Denver Gazette.
Eagle County Commissioner Matt Scherr said the federal board “should be considering the full environmental impacts for activating that line and what that freight will do.”
He said he's wary about oil trains from the Uinta Basin connecting with the Union Pacific Railroad main line that runs from Salt Lake City to Denver through the heart of Colorado.
Some 100 miles of the Union Pacific line runs along the Colorado River, including through Glenwood Canyon. Scherr said he worries a derailment would harm endangered fish and be impossible to clean up.
Proponents of the rail line said it would improve economic conditions in the Uinta Basin by providing a more efficient and safer way to transport oil from the basin’s oil fields to new markets.
“Historically, the oil that's produced in the basin has been shipped directly to refineries in the Salt Lake City area,” said Keith Heaton, executive director of the Seven Counties Infrastructure Coalition. “There are four refineries in Salt Lake. They've always taken at least 80% of the oil, generally more than that.”
Heaton’s group wants to open access to refineries elsewhere, including near Houston, Texas.
Once the new line connects with the national rail network, oil trains “can go anywhere,” Heaton said.
The benefit to tribal lands
The basin includes the Uintah and Ouray Ute Indian Tribe reservation. The tribe holds mineral rights to the oil and gas.
The Ute Tribe did not respond to requests for comment, but Ute Tribe Business Committee Vice Chairman Edred Secakuku told the Salt Lake Tribune last December that "royalties derived from these minerals enable the tribal government to provide critical services to its membership of almost 3,000 members."
"The highs and lows of commodity markets, economic cycles and geopolitical turmoil all pose risks to this vital source of funding used for education, health, policing, public works, housing, food services, natural resources and sovereign defense. The Uinta Basin Railroad enhances and expands access to both national and international markets which reduces these risks,” Secakuku said.
Travel into and out of the Uinta Basin has always been risky, constrained by two-lane highways over mountain passes, Heaton said.
Currently, all the oil produced in the basin must be hauled by tanker trucks, mostly west and north on U.S. Highway 40, to Provo, and then to the refineries around Salt Lake City.
The Utah Department of Environmental Quality interactive spill map shows more than three dozen “environmental incidents,” including diesel spills and crude oil truck rollovers on Highway 40, the narrow, two-lane mountain road between Duchesne and Provo. The department didn't specify the timeframe for these incidents.
Running oil trains on the only through rail line in Colorado “represents a significant threat to the (Colorado) River, which is the source of water for 40 million people in the Western United States,” Scherr said.
“If that hot waxy crude dumps in the river, that's a really, really big problem,” he said.
The Union Pacific central line already runs a dozen or so trains each day through the Grand Junction to Denver corridor, which includes a trip under the Continental Divide through the Moffat Tunnel near Winter Park, according to Mike Jaixen, senior manager for corporate communications for Union Pacific.
Jaixen declined to provide information on the amount of crude oil or other hazardous materials transported along that line.
Seed wants the transportation board's decision vacated and the proposal to undergo a much more detailed environmental analysis that would force the federal board to take a “hard look” at not just the emissions associated with building and operating the rail line, but also at the carbon emissions and air pollution potentials coming from the refining and end use of the oil.
The board did take a look. An environmental impact statement studied by its members concluded that specific mitigation requirements will minimize harmful impacts. Because of that, board members decided the train transportation proposal has an economic value that mitigates environmental harms, and approved the construction.
“What the Surface Transportation Board looked at was a very narrow set of issues and they also expedited approval of the rail line based on the transportation merits without adequately examining these environmental impacts. And so, it’s in our view (an) extremely deficient environmental impact statement, and they need to go back to the drawing board," said Seed.
The environmental groups argued the statement fails to consider the indirect effects of pumping and burning more crude oil from the basin.
“The other set of concerns go to the greenhouse gas emissions that will come from the construction and operation of this railway, because it's all predicated on quadrupling fossil fuel production in the Uinta basin,” Seed said. “We are concerned about these oil trains traveling anywhere.”
In its Dec. 15, 2021 decision on the Seven Counties petition, the Surface Transportation Board addressed the potential “downstream” emissions issue: “The downstream end use emissions associated with the combustion of the crude oil that could be transported on the Line under the high oil production scenario could represent up to approximately 0.8% of nationwide GHG emissions and 0.1% of global GHG emissions.”
The board's job is to deal with railroads, not regulate oil and gas extraction, according to its ruling.
“When an agency 'has no ability to prevent a certain effect due to its limited statutory authority over the relevant actions, the agency cannot be considered a legally relevant ‘cause’ of the effect' for NEPA purposes,” the board said. “Here, the board has no authority or jurisdiction over development of oil and gas in the basin nor any authority to control or mitigate the impacts of any such development."
The board added: “Because the board cannot regulate downline train operations by other carriers as part of this proceeding, it cannot regulate or mitigate impacts caused by those downline operations. The type of analysis that CBD claims is necessary is therefore neither required nor useful."
The Uinta Basin Railway is a public-private partnership with the Seven Counties Infrastructure Coalition, financed by Drexel Hamilton Infrastructure Partners and operated by Rio Grande Pacific Corp.
