Supreme Court deals blow to opponents of plan to move oil along Colorado river
The United States Supreme Court, in a decision out Thursday, overruled a lower court in favor of a plan to construct an 88-mile railroad in Utah that would link with Colorado rail lines as a route to ship hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil daily to the Gulf Coast for refining.
The plan calls for trains loaded with waxy crude extracted from the Uinta Basin area of Utah to pass along rail lines along the Colorado River, including through Glenwood Canyon.
Uinta Basin Railway
The unanimous ruling, with Justice Neil Gorsuch abstaining, deals a blow to a consortium of environmental groups and Eagle County, which oppose the plan.
The Supreme Court cited a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling that indicated the Surface Transportation Board, which has oversight in approving the rail construction project, did not adequately include a study of all important issues relating to the environmental effects of the project, including oil drilling and refining at its eventual destination.
Such a study is required under the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA. The completed study was 3,600 pages, and the Supreme Court said the requirements called for by the lower court were too much.
CBS
Writing the majority opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh stated, "Simply stated, NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock. The goal of the law is to inform agency decision making, not to paralyze it."
"They definitely told the circuit courts to, 'Hey, you need to knock this off.' But it was all based off of Supreme Court decisions that have been going on for quite some time," said Jonathan Stearmer, legal counsel for a seven-county group backing the rail line construction.
A past ruling, Department of Transportation v. Public Citizen, called for lessening the red tape associated with NEPA, saying federal agencies need not study environmental consequences that lie outside their jurisdiction.
"I think what won the day is that our position that we decided to take in the case was already the Supreme Court's position from 20-plus years ago. There were a couple circuit courts across the country that have chosen not to follow that Supreme Court precedent, and so it created a split in the circuits," said Stearmer.
CBS
In Colorado, there were objections to the Supreme Court's ruling about the Uinta project.
"We're sorry to see the Supreme Court conclude that under this environmental review process, the Surface Transportation Board can ignore some of the harmful environmental impacts that come from this project," said Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser. "They take a very narrow approach here, and they are allowing the Surface Transportation Board latitude to allow this project to go forward with some real harms."
An attorney for Eagle County, Nate Hunt, said the ruling was not a complete loss, pointing out that there are still some issues ruled on unanimously in the Circuit Court that the Supreme Court left standing.
"It ruled on a litany of issues that it deemed that the Surface Transportation Board had violated, not just under NEPA, but under three other federal statutes. None of those issues were appealed to the Supreme Court," said Hunt.
Stearmer noted that the potential for damage from the waxy crude that would be shipped out of the Uinta Basin would be lessened in a spill because the oil is more like wax at ambient temperature and less damaging.
"I think that's a nonsensical argument. This project would facilitate millions of gallons of waxy, crude oil being transferred across Colorado through the Rocky Mountains on two-mile trains and within a stone's throw of the Colorado River," said Hunt. He said Eagle County and the environmental groups would continue to try to stop the project. But the court's ruling could affect other environmental issues.
"The Supreme Court's decision on what NEPA means is going to be nationwide. It's going to affect how projects all over the country are going to be reviewed under NEPA."
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