Seattle -- With the Northwest poised to become the country's leading coal-export region, fights are emerging on several fronts.


Physicians fret about an explosion of locomotive exhaust, while mayors grumble about the potential for long traffic-snarling trains. Washington state fears that 1,200 new barge trips on the Columbia River could spark more accidents and marine-vessel groundings. Tribes worry that spilled coal could poison aquatic food webs.

But as the federal government begins its first lengthy review of plans to ship coal through Northwest ports, it's not clear how - or if - the feds will weigh in on perhaps the most far-reaching issue: the potential effect new markets for coal could have on greenhouse-gas emissions.

If each of the proposed terminals, which range from Bellingham, Wash., to Coos Bay, Ore., is built to capacity, Washington and Oregon eventually would export 150 million or more tons of coal a year - half again as much coal as all U.S. exports combined in 2011.


"If the United States is going to embark on a large-scale export of coal to Asia, it is imperative that we ask - and answer - the question of how such actions fit with the larger strategy of moving to a lower-carbon future," Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, a Democrat, said in a strongly worded letter to the secretary of the interior and the secretary of the Army.


The Seattle City Council echoed that view in May, arguing in its own letter that coal-export terminals "risk altering the country's progress" in combatting climate change.


Coal-industry analyst Andy Roberts, of the Wood Mackenzie research and consulting service, says he isn't surprised that some are arguing for using NEPA to look at the global impact of coal burning.

"But it's a national - not an international - act," Roberts said. "I think people against this kind of development will reach for any lever they can pull."


"I'm in Asia four or five months a year, and they're just drooling for it," said coal-industry analyst Randy Rahm of Topeka, Kan.

Thus far, each project calls for shipping coal by rail, mostly from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana. In Boardman, coal would be taken off trains and shipped by barge downriver to cargo ships near the Columbia's mouth. Other projects call for the black gold to stay on trains all the way to Cowlitz or Grays Harbor counties in Washington, or travel south to Oregon or north through Seattle to a port in Bellingham.

Here's why the proposals are exploding: The U.S. produces 1.1 billion tons of coal each year, but the rise of cheap natural gas and the Environmental Protection Agency's crackdown on coal-fired power plants has flat-lined coal consumption in the United States.



With the United States being home to the world's largest recoverable coal reserves, the American coal industry is pitching exports as a jobs and construction bonanza.


"Coal used to be 51 percent of our electricity generation," Rahm said. "Now it's down to 40 percent. The whole coal environment in the U.S. has changed."

But communities along rail routes from Montana to the sea have spent the past year raising questions about everything from increased train traffic to the risks from wafting coal dust. The Environmental Protection Agency said in April that both have the potential to cause "significant impacts to public health."

It's still so early that the Corps of Engineers hasn't outlined the scope of its review. The agency hasn't even decided if it will evaluate each export proposal independently as a simple construction project - or combine all of them into one and conduct a major environmental review so it can consider cumulative impacts.



In a series of letters, they've twice asked the Bureau of Land Management to reconsider plans for new coal-mining leases in Wyoming, because the federal government had evaluated only the environmental impact of domestic coal use - not the impact of coal exports through the Northwest. The bureau, in both cases, refused their request.



Industry analysts largely shrugged off the battles.

