That is directly pitted against the oil terminal
Two miles west of the 32-acre project, called the Waterfront, one of the biggest proposed oil terminals in the country is going through an environmental review, with plans to transfer North Dakota crude from rail cars to barges. Up to four trains, carrying 360,000 barrels of oil, would pass every day through this city’s downtown, only a few hundred feet from the Waterfront’s towers, westbound from the Bakken shale oil fields..
“We have a very large project that is directly pitted against the oil terminal,” said Brett VandenHeuvel, the executive director of Columbia Riverkeeper, a watchdog group for the river, and an opponent of the oil terminal.
The result is a sort of race to the crossing: If the Waterfront can get its bricks and mortar in the ground before the terminal is approved — possibly late next year, with litigation likely to follow — more people would be living and working near the oil-train line. Compounding what opponents, led by the city, say are the dangers of spills or derailments, would make the terminal’s path to approval steeper.
The surge of fossil fuels delivered by rail that is wending its way across many corners of America is hitting the Pacific Northwest — the closest straight line from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean — with a fury, and a complex new calculation of strategy for both sides.
This year, 19 trains of Bakken oil — a mile long, 100 cars each — moved through Washington each week, according to the Washington Department of Ecology, a number that could grow to 137 a week by 2020 if all the proposed oil facilities, including Vancouver’s, are approved. From British Columbia south through Oregon, four coal terminals and three coal terminal expansions, two oil pipelines, 11 oil-by-rail facilities and six natural gas pipelines have been proposed since 2012, according to a recent report by the Sightline Institute, an environmental research and advocacy group in Seattle.