<\/p>\n
On June 27, hundreds of people packed the Oakland City Council meeting where a proposal to ban the transport of coal through the California city was up for a vote. Speakers on both sides of the issue delivered passionate arguments, pitting the promise of good jobs in a depressed area against concern about environmental impacts. The meeting quickly became rowdy. \u201cThere was a lot of tension,\u201d says Rev. Ken Chambers, pastor of West Side Missionary Baptist Church in West Oakland, who spoke in support of the ban. Pro-coal supporters stationed in the audience heckled him throughout his address, and at times, Lynette Gibson McElhaney, the council president, struggled to maintain order.<\/p>\n
\u201cOfficers,\u201d she requested, \u201cplease escort those persons who continue to have disrespectful outbursts outside of the chamber.\u201d<\/p>\n
The vote came after more than a year of heated debate over plans to build a marine terminal, from which coal mined in Utah could be shipped to Asia. The proposed terminal was part of a larger redevelopment project slated for the old Oakland Army Base, located in West Oakland, a predominantly black neighborhood that\u2019s among the region\u2019s poorest and most polluted.<\/p>\n
One by one, the seven council members present voted to uphold the ban on transporting coal. The decision was finalized by a second vote on July 19, leaving the proposed $250 million project in limbo. Without coal as one of the terminal\u2019s possible bulk commodities, proponents warned, it would be at risk of losing critical funding \u2014 depriving an economically struggling neighborhood of job opportunities. Critics of the plan, however, worried that transporting millions of tons of coal by rail \u2014 even in covered cars \u2014 through West Oakland poses a public health and safety risk to local residents, who already experience high levels of air pollution.<\/p>\n
The decision \u2014 and the wider controversy around it \u2014 places Oakland at the center of a growing battle over coal exports on the West Coast. From British Columbia all the way to California, plans for new export terminals are faltering, thanks to opposition from local communities concerned about climate change and the environmental impacts of fossil fuel development.<\/p>\n
Working against that movement, however, is a network of powerful financial interests that have invested heavily in coal and are now desperate to find a way to recoup their investments and somehow still profit. The Oakland terminal was an important part of a larger plan to sell landlocked Utah coal overseas. And it was hatched in a web of money and politics that entangled struggling communities in two vastly different regions: West Oakland and rural Utah.<\/p>\n
arbon County, Utah, got its name from the vast amounts of coal found in the rugged country southeast of Salt Lake City. Coal mining took off in the late 1880s, bringing jobs along with the occasional violent upheaval. In 1897, legendary bank robber Butch Cassidy and his partner, William Ellsworth \u201cElzy\u201d Lay, stole the $8,000 payroll of the Pleasant Valley Coal Company, which operated mines in the county. And later, two mine explosions, one in 1900 and the other in 1924, killed nearly 400 people.<\/p>\n
Despite the early tumult, Carbon County grew to depend on coal economically. For most of the last century, it looked like a good bet, with coal supplying the vast majority of Utah\u2019s energy needs. Other states wanted Utah\u2019s coal as well. In the early 1980s, an electrical utility cooperative in Southern California helped persuade the state to build a massive power plant, the Intermountain Power Project (IPP), in Delta, Utah, promising to buy its coal-generated electricity.<\/p>\n
But Carbon County\u2019s fortune changed as utilities increasingly moved to replace coal with cheaper natural gas and renewables like solar and wind energy. In 2013, the city of Los Angeles, which had a contract with IPP, voted to end its reliance on coal-fired electricity by 2025, in favor of natural gas. The decision hit Carbon County hard, says County Commissioner Jae Potter. Between 75 and 80 percent of the county\u2019s jobs rely on coal mining and power generation. Over the last several years, hundreds of locals have lost their jobs as coal-fired power plants have closed and mines have shuttered.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt put us into a tailspin,\u201d says Potter. \u201cWhat do you do?\u201d<\/p>\n
But the collapsing coal market still looked profitable to one private equity firm \u2013 Galena Private Equity Resources, registered in the Cayman Islands. (Private equity firms buy up troubled or undervalued businesses and other assets, then re-structure and sell them.)<\/p>\n
In 2013, Galena invested over $104 million in Bowie Resources, a Kentucky-based coal firm, acquiring a significant minority stake in a new joint venture company called Bowie Resource Partners. Backed by money from Galena\u2019s private investors, Bowie began buying the assets of other coal companies on the verge of bankruptcy. In Utah, Bowie bought three mines from Arch Coal, which filed for bankruptcy in January.<\/p>\n
\u201cGalena has built an impressive record of prudently selecting high performing investments,\u201d said Jeremy Weir, CEO of Galena Asset Management, in a press release. \u201cWe believe that Bowie Resource Partners has a unique opportunity to reshape the Western US coal paradigm.\u201d<\/p>\n
But for the investment to pay off, Bowie needed to get that coal out of Utah and overseas to Asia, where, in contrast to the U.S. market, demand still seemed insatiable. To do that, however, it needed access to West Coast ports.<\/p>\n
Galena was not the only private equity firm to bet on coal. Lighthouse Resources, a Salt Lake City-based firm, owns two mines \u2014 one in Montana and the other in Wyoming \u2014 and is the main driver behind the proposed Millennium Bulk Terminal in Washington and the Morrow Pacific coal export project in Oregon.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor Galena, the hope was that they would help transform Bowie into a thriving export-oriented coal business so they could then sell their stake to another private equity fund or run it as a public company on the stock market,\u201d says Clark Williams-Derry, the director of energy finance at the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based environmental think tank.<\/p>\n
In its financial documents, Bowie outlined its plans to export through West Coast ports. But it glossed over a major problem: Few of the existing marine terminals in California and other West Coast states are capable of exporting the millions of tons of coal that Bowie\u2019s Utah mines could produce. A new terminal project in West Oakland, however, one equipped to handle coal, could provide the opportunity Bowie needed.<\/p>\n
West Oakland, where the terminal would be located, hugs the eastern side of San Francisco Bay. Once, it relied on the 7,000 blue-collar jobs supported by the Oakland Army Base. But the base closed in 1999, and ever since, the neighborhood has struggled.<\/p>\n
In an effort to rebuild the neighborhood\u2019s economy, the city of Oakland contracted with a private company, California Capital & Investment Group, to redevelop the old base. The Oakland Global Trade and Logistics Center would include a rail terminal, truck parking, warehouse space, a recycling center, and a bulk marine terminal. When the project was announced in 2013, the developer promised that coal was not part of the plan. Instead, the terminal would ship bulk goods like iron ore, corn, wind turbines and auto parts.<\/p>\n
But last April, a small Utah paper broke a story that the developer had tried to keep under wraps: Four counties in Utah, where Bowie\u2019s coal mines were located, intended to invest in the proposed Oakland terminal, with the intent of shipping their coal out of it.<\/p>\n
Opposition from environmental groups and West Oakland residents quickly mounted. In 2014, the nearby Port of Oakland had rejected a separate proposal from Bowie to build and operate a coal export terminal. This new proposal was equally unpopular. Surrounded by three major highways, an active railroad, and the fifth-busiest port in the U.S., West Oakland already suffers disproportionately from air pollution. According to the latest statistics, local asthma rates are 2.5 to 3 times higher than those of other Oakland neighborhoods, and many residents worried that coal dust could escape from the coal trains and make the problem worse.<\/p>\n
Still, not everyone was opposed. Last December, Rev. Chambers attended a meeting at another church on Oakland\u2019s East Side, where a representative from the terminal developer promised that bringing coal through the area would create jobs without bringing new health and safety problems. Some people in the audience perked up.<\/p>\n
Unemployment is high here, and thanks to Silicon Valley\u2019s booming tech industry, the neighborhood is undergoing a housing crisis. Rental prices in San Francisco have risen so much so that people are now snapping up property in West Oakland, driving up rents for the mostly poor working-class families who live there. To many of those gathered at the meeting in the church, the coal export facility sounded good, recalls Chambers, \u201ca way to contradict all the hardships.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kevin Barnes, one of the other pastors at the meeting, said the facility offered hope to unemployed people. \u201cI\u2019m not an environmentalist,\u201d he later said. \u201cBut I support this project because I believe some jobs can come in \u2014 all they\u2019re asking for is a chance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Given the coal industry\u2019s precipitous decline, however, that optimism can appear tenuous. Nationwide, coal consumption has declined by nearly a third since its peak in 2007, when it was the dominant source of U.S. power. Over the past five years, the international benchmark prices for coal have fallen by more than 50 percent. Meanwhile, the prospect of booming markets abroad has begun to fade. China has started burning less coal, and imports have shrunk accordingly. Other Asian countries, especially India, have developed new coal supplies, driving prices down even further. Many of the private equity firms that invested on the promise of overseas markets have had trouble finding new investors and buyers for their coal assets.<\/p>\n
Even Bob Murray, the CEO of coal giant Murray Energy, who has filed more than a dozen lawsuits over federal climate change policies, admitted that politicians should stop setting unrealistic expectations for coal\u2019s big comeback. \u201cI don\u2019t think it will be a thriving industry ever again,\u201d Murray said. \u201cWe\u2019ll hold our own. It will be an extremely competitive industry and it will be half-size. \u2026 The coal mines cannot come back to where they were or anywhere near it.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s still unclear what Oakland\u2019s decision to ban coal exports will mean for the terminal \u2014 whether the developer will raise enough money to build it for other products or decide to challenge the city\u2019s decision in court, like the proponents of the proposed Morrow Pacific terminal did in Oregon after state regulators denied the project a key permit.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very hard to actually kill a project until proponents give up,\u201d says Williams-Derry. And the coal market is likely to continue to fluctuate, even as its future dims. Small rebounds like one this May, where China\u2019s coal imports increased slightly for the first time in 22 months, may be enough \u201cto keep proponents\u2019 dreams alive until something bigger changes,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
For Oakland, though, last month\u2019s vote to ban coal exports signaled a new approach. Air-quality conditions in the polluted port neighborhood have improved, thanks to new laws regulating emissions. During the Paris climate negotiations last year, Oakland was recognized for its efforts at reducing greenhouse gases and black carbon emissions from trucks diesel ships. After struggling so long to improve his community\u2019s air, Rev. Chambers, like many of his neighbors, feels allowing coal exports would be a step back.<\/p>\n
Still, he feels badly for places like Carbon County that have hitched themselves to a single commodity. \u201cThey\u2019re struggling, too,\u201d he says, and West Oakland can empathize.<\/p>\n
Like Carbon County, Chambers\u2019 community needs jobs, but not, he believes, at the expense of human health. All four of Chambers\u2019 children developed asthma, and the family spent a lot of time when they were growing up at the hospital.<\/p>\n
Keeping coal out of Oakland is about more than protecting his neighborhood. For Chambers, this is why the fight matters: the stuff we put in the air isn\u2019t just local, it\u2019s global. \u201cWhen we keep it [coal] in the ground, it helps people in Utah, and it helps people in China, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
This article was published on hcn.org. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" coal interests helped push a secret plan to export coal from CaliforniaCompanies and investors are trying to survive a collapsing U.S. coal market.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":73417,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[1424,738,121],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-73416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-coal","tag-environmental-issue","tag-utah"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73416"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=73416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}