A train of tanker cars travels the tracks along the Colorado River near Cameo on May 16, 2023. (Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline)
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday accepted a last-ditch appeal from the backers of a controversial oil-by-rail project in eastern Utah, agreeing to review a lower-court ruling that sided with a Colorado county and environmental groups who accused federal regulators of failing to adequately analyze the proposal’s downstream risks.
In an August 2023 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found that the Surface Transportation Board’s approval of the 88-mile Uinta Basin Railway contained “numerous” and “significant” violations of the National Environmental Policy Act, and ordered the STB to correct deficiencies in the project’s environmental impact statement. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a group of Utah county governments backing the project, appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court in March.
In a list of case orders released Monday morning, the court issued a so-called writ of certiorari and agreed to review the case. Only a small fraction of the thousands of cases appealed to the Supreme Court annually are granted and heard by the court.
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An ambitious multibillion-dollar scheme first formally proposed in 2019, the Uinta Basin Railway aims to connect Utah’s largest oil field to the national rail network, allowing drillers there to ship large volumes of the basin’s “waxy” crude oil to Gulf Coast refineries. At an estimated capacity of up to 350,000 barrels exported per day, it would rank among the largest sustained efforts to transport oil by rail ever undertaken in the U.S., singlehandedly more than doubling the nationwide total in 2022, and causing a tenfold increase in hazmat rail traffic through environmentally sensitive and densely populated areas in Colorado.
Colorado’s Eagle County joined five environmental groups in suing the STB over its 2021 approval of the project, arguing the agency’s analysis had violated NEPA. A three-judge Court of Appeals panel agreed, directing the STB to further scrutinize downstream risks of increased oil-train traffic in Colorado, wildfire hazards, impacts on communities along the Gulf Coast and more.
In its March 4 petition to the Supreme Court, the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition argued that the lower court’s ruling conflicted with existing case law, and that analysis of such “distant effects” would exceed the STB’s authority.
“Agencies need a manageable line to guide their NEPA studies, and this Court is now the only place to find one,” the coalition wrote.
In a reply brief, Eagle County and the environmental groups wrote that the lower court “correctly concluded the Board has authority to consider the reasonably foreseeable effects of oil production and refining that the Railway would induce.”
The Court of Appeals ruling remanded the project’s application for approval back to the STB. In January, citing the ruling, the U.S. Forest Service withdrew a key permit for construction of a segment of the railway through a protected area in the Ashley National Forest, pending further proceedings at the STB.
Keith Heaton, the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition’s executive director, told a committee of Utah lawmakers in February that while he believed the project had “a very good case before the Supreme Court,” his organization was prepared for a do-over of the NEPA process if necessary.
“Worst case scenario is we can always go back and re-do the environmental impact statement,” Heaton said.
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