By Andrew Christie, Chapter Director
When making a series of statements in support of a proposition, it’s not easy to contrive to make every single word into an evasion that completely evades the truth like a skater performing a series of figure eights.
But on September 30, 2014, talking to a KSBY reporter, the Phillips 66 Santa Maria Refinery superintendent pulled it off. Discussing the proposed construction of a rail spur at the refinery to accommodate an influx of trains laden with millions of gallons of tar sands crude oil, he said this:
"The entire project will be on Phillips 66 property here at the refinery. The project does not increase any intake and throughput of the refinery and it would be a way for us to obtain crude oil from additional sources throughout the United States."
Let’s break it down:
- Yes, the rail spur will be on Phillips 66 property. But it will double oil train traffic via mile-long trains hauling more than five hundred million gallons of toxic crude per year through the county – along the coast, across aging bridges and past homes and schools – and that will occupy half the length of California. So will the carcinogenic seep of crude oil out of those tank cars over those hundreds of miles.
- No, the project will not increase the throughput of the refinery – because Phillips 66 already asked for and got a throughput increase three years ago. At the time, it said not a word to regulatory agencies about the refinery rail spur project application that it would be submitting right after the throughput increase was approved. This oh-didn’t-we-mention? gambit is known as piecemealing.
- Yes, the project could be a way for Phillips 66 to obtain crude oil from additional sources throughout the United States, but it will actually be is a way to obtain crude from Canada – i.e. Alberta tar sands heavy crude, one of the world’s dirtiest and most environmentally destructive fossil fuels and the primary source of oil for the project. This can be determined from a glance at a table in the project’s Environmental Impact Report labeled “Properties of Current and Potential Future Crude Oils at the Santa Maria Refinery,” which lists exactly two potential future crudes along with the footnote: “Both potential crudes by rail are Canadian tar sand dilbits.”
How to best determine the truth of the Phillips 66 oil train terminal project? Look at what the County is doing in fulfilling the requirement for public notification of the first planning commission hearings on the project, to be held on February 4th and 5th.
The County is legally required to send a notice only to residents who live within 300 feet of the refinery. But instead of doing that, they are noticing all the jurisdictions along the rail line in California that obtained a Draft Environmental Impact Report, everyone who has asked to be on a list of interested parties or submitted a comment on the EIR, and everyone residing within 2,000 feet of the Union Pacific line for the length of the County (almost but not quite equivalent to the Department of Transportation’s evacuation zone for oil train derailments – aka the “blast zone.” Check your proximity on the map at explosive-crude-by-rail.org).
This is unprecedented. It underscores the breadth of the project’s potential impacts and the disingenuousness of the effort to imply that those impacts are somehow confined to the area immediately surrounding an oil refinery in Nipomo.
We hope to see you at the County Government Center on February 4th and 5th, when you should make the effort to come to the hearings and urge the planning commission to deny the permit for this project. (If you want to help get the word out, go to stopoiltrains.nationbuilder.com/volunteer.)
It will be a long hearing; you will probably have to take the day off from work. If you don’t think the disruption of your schedule is worth the hassle, consider that County Planning Commissioners will be getting the full-court press for approval from industry lobbyists. Then consider the consequences of one derailment next to the Salinas River or the Oceano Dunes Preserve or in Price Canyon; one runaway train on the Cuesta Grade, 80 tank cars plowing into the 120-year-old Stenner Creek Bridge and the water treatment plant below it.
Silence denotes consent, and consenting to this project means bowing to the demands of the oil industry and living the rest of our lives on a Central Coast transformed by that industry’s pursuit of higher profits at any cost.
They’ll make the profits and we’ll pay the cost.