Even if the Phillips 66 project could be guaranteed derailment & explosion free, it should be denied
by Andrew Christie, Chapter Director
On both sides of the local and statewide debate over the Phillips 66 rail spur project that would facilitate the transport and refining of tar sands crude oil in SLO County, the prospect of fiery derailments and explosions tends to suck all the air out of the room.
That’s pretty much what one would expect fiery explosions to do. But let’s set that prospect aside for a moment and take a look at the air that’s getting sucked out of the room – specifically, the air you breathe as the resident of a county that may or may not agree to permit the five-times-a-week transport and refining of the world’s dirtiest crude oil.
First, let’s look at one of the favorite canards of project proponents: The oil that Phillips 66 is proposing to haul through the county is the same stuff that is passing through the county now, two or three times a week, from the San Ardo oil field in Monterey County.
The next time you hear or see that claim in our local media, you should leap to your keyboard and point out that 1) no it’s not, and 2) those San Ardo trains are indeed just passing through: They’re not stopping to off-load and off-gas at a local refinery switching to tar sands crude feedstock.
Let me briefly return to those explosive fireballs (they are hard to get away from). It’s difficult to set San Ardo crude on fire. Tar sands crude, when mixed with diluent and poured into a tanker car, can ignite at any temperature above zero degrees fahrenheit -- i.e. not at all hard to set on fire.
That tar sands crude is nothing like San Ardo crude has been pointed out more than once in the local media by various folks, with no noticeable effect on the reiteration of the same-as-San-Ardo claim by project supporters — the telltale sign that you are not having a debate with an individual capable of changing his or her mind when confronted with contrary or missing facts, but someone who has been drafted to reiterate p.r. talking points in a continuous loop. (Al Fonzi’s recent Tribune op ed tried to support the “same stuff” claim with comparative vapor pressures while staying silent on comparative flash points, aka how easily does this stuff catch fire?)
But for Mr. Fonzi and the other folks who are urging our local decision makers to spin the roulette wheel and dismiss the scenario of a derailment/spill/explosion/fire as a remote and unlikely possibility (and that case got harder for those folks after the L.A. Times reported on the systemic problem of track failure under the weight of oil trains, the heaviest freight on the rails), there remain the intractable problems built into the project that are not a matter of chance, but of certainty. And one of those problems is what will happen to the quality of our air if the project is permitted.
In the Phillips 66 rail spur project’s Environmental Impact Report, nestled in the midst of Impact Summary Tables in a section labeled “CLASS I Impacts – Rail Spur Project: Impacts That May Not Be Fully Mitigated To Less Than Significant Levels,” you will find this:
AQ-5: Operational activities of trains along the mainline rail route associated with the Rail Spur Project would generate toxic emissions that exceed thresholds.
This is one of eleven significant “impacts that must be addressed in a ‘statement of overriding consideration’ if the project is approved.” That means the County Planning Commission and/or Board of Supervisors must make a legal finding of fact that the benefits which the project will bestow upon the people of San Luis Obispo County are somehow so great, they outweigh its threshold-exceeding toxic emissions, as well as the risk of oil spills, explosions and fires that can be so hot and uncontrollable they must be left to burn themselves out over several days.
But it’s not just a matter of debate between those who think that the alleged benefits of the Phillips 66 project would somehow make it worth living in a place with “toxic emissions that exceed thresholds.” There’s a problem — actually a number of problems — with the Environmental Impact Report on which our decision makers must base that decision. This passage reveals much about the sleight-of-hand tendencies of the EIR:
Emissions of fugitive hydrocarbons from the Rail Spur Project would be substantially less than that from the existing refinery (1tons/yr versus 33 tons/year). The Applicant indicates the expected [hydrogen sulfide] content of the crude oil vapor could be about one percent by weight.
Take note: No mention of the difference in the kind of emissions represented by the Rail Spur Project vs. the existing refinery’s emissions. Existing emissions are not emissions from refining tar sand crude oil, which is loaded with lead, copper, vanadium, and volatile organic compounds — another way in which it differs significantly from San Ardo crude. In a table purporting to represent “Properties of Current and Potential Crude Oils at the Santa Maria Refinery,” the EIR does not even include comparative amounts of lead between the refinery’s current “typical crude blend” and tar sands crude. (Hint: there’s a lot of lead in tar sands oil.) Nor will you find acknowledgment or analysis of the whole chemical cocktail of vaporizing elements, not just (extremely toxic) hydrogen sulfide. Nor is there any acknowledgment or analysis of the fact that the reassuring “one percent by weight” statistic represents 20,000 gallons per train, five times a week, vaporizing and out-gassing as each train rolls through your town en route to the Nipomo Mesa. The NRDC has calculated that a day’s worth of vaporizing leakage from a 100-car oil train traveling 260 miles through California roughly equates to nine tons of reactive organic gasses (ROG) released into the air.
This phenomenon, known in the trade as “crude shrinkage” or “settling in transit,” is absent from the EIR, which does not include these emissions in its emission calculations.
Breathing a cumulative dose of poisons and carcinogens in your daily air supply can make you just as dead as a rapidly expanding fireball. It will just take longer.
Which means if this project gets a permit, it won’t just be a potential problem for everyone living in the evacuation zone within one mile of the tracks. It will be a daily, chronic problem for millions of Californians. We will all find out what it feels like to live in an industrial sacrifice zone.
In other words, the fireball is a risk, something project supporters want to bet won’t happen here. But threshold-exceeding toxic emissions – at a level even worse than what the project’s Environmental Impact Report is willing to admit to — are a sure thing.
To make sure we don’t place a bet we can’t win, go to protectslo.org.