Uinta Basin Railway: When is a railroad not a railroad?

The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) earlier this month dealt another blow to the beleaguered Uinta Basin Railway (UBR), an 88-mile line proposed to connect oil fields in the Uinta Basin to the national rail network near Price, Utah, in order to access Gulf Coast refineries. The trains coming out of Price would have increased the amount of waxy crude shipped east by rail to between 130,000 to 350,000 barrels per day. Those trains would have crossed Colorado, including along the Colorado River in the I-70 corridor.

Attorneys for the USFS, in a joint motion to govern further proceedings filed on Jan. 11 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, stated, “In light of the Eagle County decision, the Forest Service plans to withdraw the July 14, 2022 Record of Decision that is the subject of this petition for review.”

The Eagle County decision refers to the Aug. 18, 2023 D.C. Circuit Court’s overruling of the Federal Surface Transportation Board’s (STB) December 2021 decision to approve the UBR. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit included the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), three additional conservation groups, Eagle County and several other Colorado communities, including Glenwood Springs.

In September, the D.C. Circuit Court judge put the USFS case in abeyance pending a mandate in the Eagle County case. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition (SCIC) and other defendants appealed the August decision, requesting that the case be heard en banc (a session in which a case is heard before all the judges of a court rather than by one judge or a smaller panel of judges), but the court decided against the hearing and gave its final decision, or mandate, on the Eagle County case in December.

“It’s good news that the Forest Service is withdrawing this decision,” said Ted Zukoski, CBD attorney, in an interview with The Sopris Sun. “It’s good news for the roadless area that the railroad would have gone through and it’s good news for the wildlife that uses those lands and forests.”

The original USFS approval of the UBR in July 2023 went hand-in-hand with the STB approval and relied upon the environmental impact statement and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s biological opinion that were vacated in the Eagle County decision. “This means that the Forest Service is going to have to go back and do more studies before they can reissue a decision approving the railway,” Zukoski explained.

So, at this point, the UBR isn’t going anywhere, but about 30,000 barrels of Uinta Basin crude still cross Colorado daily by rail, and producers in the Basin have other plans to increase the flow. “We’re happy that we won this battle in court,” said Zukoski, “but the war continues.”

And it’s a complicated war. Those other plans involve three transloading facilities in the Price/Helper area — the Savage terminal, the Price River terminal, and the Wildcat loadout facility — that take crude from trucks coming out of the Uinta Basin and load it onto rail cars headed east across Colorado and south to the Gulf Coast. “All three of those facilities are seeking approval to increase the volume of throughput,” Zukoski explained.

Producers want to increase throughput by at least 100,000 barrels per day, which would maintain the amount of oil traveling across the country that was proposed by the UBR. “When they’re seeking to increase the volume, they need new tanks, they need new facilities,” explained Zukoski. New facilities, more trucks and a rise in Basin crude production will also increase air pollution. “All of that will require approval by the Utah Division of Air Quality with some oversight from the federal [Environmental Protection Agency].”

Uinta Basin oil producers and their supporters are also working on funding improvements to Highway 191 through Indian Canyon to handle the increase of trucks traveling between the oil fields and the loadout facilities. Zukoski added, “It is evident that they’re moving on to Plan B and that they are desperately trying to get more oil out of the Basin and into the markets away from Salt Lake [City].”

At the Jan. 11 SCIC meeting, UBR proponents stated that, since the recent Circuit Court decision, they weren’t sure of their next step but were not dissuaded by what they called “standard action” on the part of the USFS. Representatives of the USFS were unavailable for comment before press time.