It’s official. The proposed Tongue River Railroad is done. Today the Surface Transportation Board issued a decision officially ending the Tongue River Railroad. On November 25, 2015, the Tongue River Railroad Company had asked the STB to hold the application in abeyance, which means they wanted the STB to suspend work on the permit application but keep the docket open until the proposed Otter Creek mine received a permit from the state of Montana. On Earth Day, April 22, 2016, the Surface Transportation Board met and decided to deny…
On June 15, 2015 at the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s annual conference in Washington, Matthew K. Rose, Burlington Northern Santa Fe’s (BNSF) executive chairman, said the following concerning infrastructure investments that BNSF made in the Powder River Basin (PRB). “Less than 10 years later, I don’t anticipate that we’ll see that level of coal volume again. That leaves us with millions of dollars in investment in what will eventually be stranded assets.” Rose also stated that PRB coal accounts for about 20% of BNSF’s traffic, down from 25%. He…
According to the Surface Transportation Board (STB), coal miners are going to lose their job if the proposed Otter Creek mine and Tongue River Railroad (TRR) are built. Seems counterintuitive doesn’t it? I’ll explain shortly but before I get started let’s get some things out of the way in the spirit of full disclosure. Am I the right messenger on this? Probably not but no one else seems to want to dive into these waters so here it goes. You all know that I am personally opposed to…
It’s here. On April 17, 2015 the Surface Transportation Board (STB) released the draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for the proposed Tongue River Railroad (TRR) and I am just getting around to writing about it. I was prompted by a reader who commented on my last TRR blog, “why haven’t you written about this yet!!!” The answer is that I am trying to read and take notes and check references on thousands of pages of the DEIS (weighs about 20lbs) so I can write substantive comments in the short 60-day time frame…
On December 5, 2014 the Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) sent Arch Coal a deficiency notice on their air quality permit application for the proposed Otter Creek coal mine. Arch Coal submitted an air quality permit application to DEQ on November 6, 2014. I don’t spend much time with air quality permits so I checked with some folks that do and apparently it is quite common for mining companies to receive deficiency notices on their air quality permit applications and to go back and forth with the permitting…
Here is a quick update for folks following the proposed Otter Creek mine. (#1 is background for #2 and #3, #4 is just common sense). 1. In 2012, Arch Coal submitted an application to acquire a permit from the state of Montana to mine coal in the Otter Creek Valley, a couple years after they leased the coal tracts. In bureaucratic speak, what they submitted is called a “permit application.” It was a shit permit application. Arch Coal left out entire sections, had poor baseline data and did not come…
In 2010, Arch Coal leased the Otter Creek coal tracts from the state of Montana. If you are interested in how the proposed Otter Creek mine came to be please read my short Otter Creek play that I wrote,”Once Upon A Mine”. There is supposed to be a part II but I’m having a hard time making it funny since whole debacle is so goddamned depressing. However, I am not writing today to talk about the leasing or the corporate pandering by our elected officials or the lack of vision for…
This week, Montana’s Secretary of State Linda McCulloch went on a tour of the Otter Creek valley, southeast of Ashland, MT, and the Black Thunder Coal Mine, outside of Gillette, WY, with representatives from Arch Coal and other unnamed Montana legislators. She posted a couple pictures on Twitter (see below) and here and here. She seems pretty excited about it. I know when I go to the Otter Creek Valley, the first thing I think is that what the pristine, beautiful and quiet valley needs is actually a big…
It is no secret that Arch Coal and Burlington Northern Santa Fe are pushing to turn the Otter Creek and Tongue River Valleys into an industrial corridor to ship Montana’ s coal to Asia. I have moments of cynicism where it seems that we are at the mercy of international financial markets, political power brokers and men in suits that make a living in a boardroom. I know that, to them, southeastern Montana is nothing but an untapped natural resource piggy bank that they can use to increase…