This story was first published mother jones Reprinted here as part of. climate desk collaboration.
Utah has worked out its problems with such bigwigs over the years, but one of the more enduring railroads is the Uinta Basin Railroad. The proposed 88-mile rail line would connect the state railroad to oil fields in eastern Utah’s remote Uinta Basin region, allowing up to 350,000 barrels of waxy crude oil to be shipped to refineries on the Gulf Coast. is. The railroad would allow oil companies to quadruple production in the basin and would be the largest U.S. rail infrastructure project since the 1970s.
But the Uinta Basin Railway will probably never be built. The Uinta Basin is surrounded by the towering mountains of the Wasatch Mountains to the west and the Uinta Mountains to the north. Running oil trains through mountainous areas would be dangerous and cost-prohibitive, especially as the world seeks to reduce its use of fossil fuels. That’s why die-hard railroad proponents, including the state’s congressional delegation, likely won’t be able to get trains onto the tracks. But they succeeded in one thing. It provided an opportunity for the activist Supreme Court to harshly criticize one of the nation’s oldest environmental laws, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
Enacted in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to consider the environmental and public health impacts of highway construction, oil drilling, pipeline construction, and more on public lands. Big polluters, especially oil and gas companies, hate NEPA because it gives the public the means to block dirty development projects. They’ve been trying to undermine it for years. During the previous Trump administration.
Last week, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments, Seven Counties Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle CountyFormer Attorney General Paul Clement told the judge that NEPA was “intended to inform government decision-making, not paralyze it,” relaying the companies’ complaints. They argued that the law creates a “roadblock” to railroads and other valuable infrastructure projects through excessive environmental analysis. “NEPA adds an attractive litigation target for project opponents,” Clement told the court.
However, NEPA has little to do with why the Uinta Basin Railroad is not built. “The courts are doing the dirty work for all these industries that have an interest in changing environmental laws,” Sam Sankar, senior vice president of Earthjustice, said at a press conference about the lawsuit, adding that Congress is He noted that it has already streamlined NEPA regulations. Last year’s process. Earthjustice represents the environmental groups involved in the case. “The fact that the court has taken up this case means that the court is not deciding the case, but merely issuing policy decisions from the court.”
The idea of building a railroad from the Uinta Basin to refineries in places like Salt Lake City has been brewing for more than 25 years. As we discussed in 2022, this basin is home to Utah’s largest, but still small, oil and gas fields.
Trapped within the basin’s sandstone formations is an estimated 50 billion to 321 billion barrels of conventional oil, plus 14 billion to 15 billion barrels of tar sands; The basin sits atop a giant geological wonder known as the Green River Formation, which stretches across Colorado and Wyoming and contains an estimated 3 trillion barrels of oil shale. In 2012, the U.S. Government Accountability Office report to parliament If even half of the unconventional oil in the formation could be recovered, it would be “comparable to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”
Wildcat speculators, big oil companies and state officials have been salivating over the Uinta Basin’s rich oil reserves for years, but have never been able to fully exploit them. The oil in the basin is a waxy crude oil that must be heated to 115 degrees to remain liquid, a problem that ruled out early attempts to build a pipeline. of Seven County Infrastructure UnionA quasi-governmental organization made up of Utah’s major oil, gas and coal-producing counties is receiving $28 million in public funding to plan and promote the railroad as a way to get around this obstacle. The Union is one of the appellants in the Supreme Court case.
“We don’t have a highway that goes into the Uinta Basin,” Mike McKee, the coalition’s former executive director, told me in 2022. “But it was difficult because there were high mountains around us.”
Of course, there are no major highways out of the basin for the same reason railroads were never built. The current two-lane road from Salt Lake City tops out at about 10,000 feet above sea level. A train to cross. Therefore, the current railway plan calls for tunneling through the mountain. But I’ll go through it could be as dangerous as going That’s all that. There are pockets of explosives in the unstable mountain rocks. methane Other gases are also included, but not all have been mapped.
Despite this, the seven-county coalition notified the federal Water Transportation Board (STB) of its intention to apply for a rail permit in 2019. The following year, the board began an environmental review process that included public input.
In December 2021, the STB found that the transport benefits of rail outweigh the significant environmental impacts. The government approved the railway despite pointing out that the dangers posed by tunneling, both in its construction and operation, “could cause injury or death.” The coalition recommended that geoengineering research be conducted, but it has not done so.
Among the many issues the board failed to consider when approving the project was the impact of the additional 18 miles of petroleum rail cars the railroad would add to the Union Pacific line through Colorado; That includes Eagle County, where the ski area is located. Vail. In addition to creating a significant risk of wildfires, the additional trains will run within a few feet of the Colorado River, where oil spills can occur regularly and threaten drinking water for 40 million people. may be threatened. Deficiencies in STB environmental impact statements prompt environmentalists to Ask the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for review STB decision as in Eagle County.
Can you tell if a “bomb train” is coming to your town? It’s complicated.
In August 2023, court of appeals Revoked STB’s railway approval. Among the many problems the report found was that the STB failed to assess “serious concerns about financial viability in determining the transportation benefits of the project.” A 2018 feasibility study commissioned by the coalition itself estimated that building the line would cost at least $5 billion, require 3,000 workers, take at least 10 years to complete and require no investment from the private sector. It was estimated that government bond financing would be necessary as there were few incentives. Railway.
Justin Mikulka, a researcher at the New Consensus think tank who studies the finances of the energy transition, told me in 2022. “Someone would have built this railroad 20 years ago if there was money to be made.” The appeals court was also skeptical about whether the railroad had a future. “Given the documentary evidence identified by the appellants, including the 2018 feasibility study, there are similar reasons to doubt the financial viability of the railroad.”
In fact, the plan approved by the STB states that building the line will cost just $2 billion, to be paid for by private investors. However, so far only public funds have been invested in the project. This individual investor, who is also one of the appellants in the Supreme Court case, is a company called . DHIP group. When I wrote about the railroad in 2022, DHIP’s website showed involvement in only two projects: the Uintah Basin Railroad and the Louisiana Plaque Mines Oil Export Terminal, which was canceled in 2021. . Currently, the long-discontinued Louisiana project is still listed on the website. As stated on its website, the company has added self-storage facilities in New York State to its portfolio. concrete box That’s very different from complex multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects.
DHIP’s website also touts its sponsorship of Integrated Rail and Resources Acquisition Corporation, a new company the company took public in 2021 with a $230 million IPO. However, the company disclosed in its March 2024 SEC filing that the New York Stock Exchange: That’s because they haven’t done anything in the three years since their IPO. (The company managed to hold on.) Despite environmental concerns, it seems unlikely that DHIP will come up with $2 billion to build the railroad. A DHIP spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Even if environmentalists had not filed a lawsuit to block the railroad, the railroad likely would have died under the weight of its impracticability. Instead, the Seven County Union appealed the decision He appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the Court of Appeals had erred in making its decision. It called on the STB to investigate the impact on the region of oil wells and refineries that it did not have the authority to regulate. In July, the Supreme Court agreed to take the case.
Courts are now poised to consider just one question raised by lower courts and issue decisions with broader threats to environmental regulation: Supreme Court precedent prohibits NEPA analysis from regulating agencies. Is the law strictly limited to environmental issues that are relevant to the project, or does the law allow agencies to weigh the broader impacts of the project that may be regulated by other agencies, such as air pollution or water pollution? for?
During oral arguments in the case, Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed frustration with Clement’s suggestion that NEPA review would prevent the court from considering impacts that are “distant in time and geography.” did. She suggested that such an interpretation goes against the core of the law, saying that if a federal agency allowed a car to go on the market, for example, “a car could leave a thousand miles, 40 states and explode.” ” he pointed out. It is a reasonably foreseeable outcome that is geographically and temporally distant. ” Federal agencies should absolutely consider such risks, she implied.
“We need absolute rules that don’t make sense,” Sotomayor told Clement.
But Sotomayor appeared to be the only one defending NEPA, and a majority of the other seven justices seemed inclined to seek at least some restrictions on the law. (Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case because his former backer, Denver-based billionaire Philip Anschutz, had a potential financial stake in the outcome of the case.) Anschutz Exploration Corporation, an oil and gas company, has drilling leases from the state of Utah and the federal government, as well as elsewhere. filed a court brief inside the case. )
Although the justices seemed inclined to hamstring NEPA, such a ruling would be a hollow victory for the Utah railroad promoters who filed the lawsuit. Beyond the NEPA issue, the appeals court cited at least six other reasons why the railroad was illegal when it invalidated the STB’s decision approving the railroad. None of this is affected by the Supreme Court’s decision in the seven-county coalition case. The STB permit remains invalid and oil trains cannot leave the station.
There will be a winner in this case, but if the court rules to rein in NEPA, the likely winner will be the big fossil fuel companies and other companies whose operations would benefit from less environmental oversight. It will be. For example, this case could lead courts to severely limit the scope of environmental damage that future infrastructure projects must consider, which could mean that the public can’t understand the health and environmental impacts of oil and gas. Make sure to consider before approving wells and pipelines, which means it will be more difficult to enforce.
“This case is bigger than the Uinta Basin Railroad,” Earthjustice’s Sankar said. “The fossil fuel industry and its allies are making wild claims that hide the clear health consequences of government decisions from the public.” The court is expected to rule by June next year.
