January 19, 2016
by Mary Finneran
When this was being written, New Yorkers were finalizing their plans to celebrate Thanksgiving. We like to think of it as a day commemorating the time when immigrants from England joined the local inhabitants in sharing their bounty.
Alternatively, some would say that holiday is more a time to reflect on how the historical Pilgrims usurped the homes, land, and universal rights of the indigenous peoples.
This second scenario parallels in several ways how today’s Pilgrim Pipeline Company tries to come across as a good neighbor in New York and New Jersey when, in essence, its objective would usurp the people’s rights to a healthy home and environment. The company intends to profit from the export of refined petroleum products, which would be of little or no benefit to citizens who would have to live with the dangers and decimation inherent in oil pipeline construction and maintenance.
Pilgrim Pipeline Holdings LLC is a company whose president, Errol Boyle, and vice president, Roger Williams, are both former executives of the well-known — some might say nefarious — Koch Industries. Their proposed Pilgrim project would involve the construction of two oil pipelines sharing the same six-foot ditch for a 170-mile stretch through the Hudson Valley and south. The requisite pumping stations, the equivalent to compressor stations for natural gas, are planned to be at about 50-mile increments. Five lateral pipelines are also in the plans.
One of the main parallel pipelines would carry Bakken crude oil (and quite possibly tar sands crude) from Albany to refineries in Linden, New Jersey. (These products would reach Albany via infamous “bomb trains.”)
A second pipeline would transport the refined petroleum, including such products as kerosene, gasoline, or heating oil, back to the port of Albany. According to Pilgrim, “The pipeline would handle an estimated 200,000 barrels in each direction each day (a total of 73 million barrels annually), roughly the amount of fuels currently transported along the Hudson by other modes of transportation.” Despite the implication of this statement, there is no evidence that the “other modes of transportation” would be replaced by the pipeline, nor that pipelines would be preferable.
The Pilgrim Pipeline(s) path plan in New York would, for the most part, follow I87, the eastern part of the NYS Thruway. It would traverse numerous creeks and rivers, including the Hudson, and very deep and wide gorges — the Catskill, Cauterskill, Esopus, and others. Where the geography of the thruway precludes this path (for some reason wide gorges don’t seem insurmountable to them), the company would hope to follow electric power rights of way and other utility ROWs, although both National Grid and Central Hudson Gas and Electric have stated that they would not allow their ROWs to be used by Pilgrim because of liability concerns.
Kate Millsaps, formerly of the New Jersey Sierra Club, helped spearhead the opposition there in 2014. New Jersey led the charge so that eventually all the townships on the pipeline path in the state have filed either resolutions or ordinances against the pipeline. New York is rapidly adding resolutions by the week opposing it as well. Between the two states, 58 towns have passed resolutions. There have also been anti-pipeline zoning ordinances and county resolutions.
In November, Pilgrim announced it had filed an application, including a draft environmental impact statement (dEIS), with the NYS Thruway Authority in August, three months earlier. So much for timely transparency!
Subsequently, Robert Magna of the Thruway Authority wrote a letter to the DEC, offering it the opportunity to take on the role of lead agency due to the SEQRA Title I status of the project. The DEC responded that it “will participate in the Thruway Authority’s coordinated and rigorous review of the project application to ensure that all the potential environmental impacts are adequately identified and addressed.”
In a press release sent out by the Coalition Against the Pilgrim Pipeline NY (CAPPNY), the Atlantic Chapter’s conservation director, Roger Downs, said the following regarding Pilgrim Pipelines’ dEIS:
“...The document’s dismissive tone about the risks associated with these pipelines starkly contrasts [with] our national experience with catastrophic crude oil pipeline spills and explosions that have resulted in billion-dollar cleanup costs and devastated communities.”
Refined oil, gasoline, kerosene, etc., are even more volatile than crude, and to see the two paralleling each other seems to be more than just doubling the danger — especially considering the natural gas pipelines they would cross.
New Yorkers associated with CAPP have requested that towns on the path reject the Thruway Authority’s request to be the lead agency to review the Pilgrim Pipeline application, and request that the DEC be granted that position. Recently the DEC said it would work with the Thruway as co-lead agency, but this does not resolve the Thruway’s conflict of interest — it would receive revenue for use of the Thruway’s ROW.
Also, as Roger Downs said, “Pilgrim’s twin pipelines would threaten our drinking water supplies, gravely endanger every community in [its] path, and bring even more oil trains into New York … to service the southbound crude oil pipeline.”
In other words, this new assault against New Yorkers by the oil industry must be stopped. This writer personally would like to see the application be denied immediately by the Thruway Authority due to the lack of feasibility of two parallel, volatile pipelines running along a route that sees megatons of vehicles vibrating the ground through which the pipelines pass. As a former welder I would not want to guarantee my welds would meet such a test.
Regardless of the strategy, let us hope that before the next Thanksgiving, we will be proud and grateful to have sent this Pilgrim packing.
For more information, visit www.stoppilgrimpipeline.com.
Mary Finneran is an art teacher and member of the Mid-Hudson Group. She serves on the Chapter’s Gas Task Force.