Recent News

lohud.com: The Coast Guard is floating the idea of adding more places for commercial vessels to drop anchor on the Hudson River.

10 locations between Yonkers and Kingston have been chosen as potential anchorages, including sites at Tomkins Cove and Montrose.

The Coast Guard is asking for public feedback on the plan, which officials said is meant to make river traffic safer and more efficient.

Commercial vessels such as barges and their attending tug, tow or push boats would be expected to use the anchor sites. Coast Guard officials say that would accommodate a variety of vessels and configurations and would not interfere with areas of the river where boats have historically plied the waters.  Read more.

Daily Freeman: The Hudson River may still become a major corridor for the shipment of thick, tar sands oil from Canada despite moves last year by New York officials that many thought stopped those efforts.

At issue is a key air permit needed by an oil terminal in Albany to transfer heavy crude from railcars to barges that would travel down the Hudson and past some of New Jersey’s most densely populated communities on their way to refineries.

Although oil spills by tankers have decreased in recent decades, environmentalists and some local officials say heavy crude represents a significant threat to the Hudson because it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to fully clean up.

Many believed the proposal by Global Partners LP was defeated last year when the New York Department of Environmental Conservation reversed its original approval of the plan after the agency received considerable backlash. But the permit issue is now slowly wending its way through New York courts.

“A lot of people thought it was the end of the story, but it’s really just in a state of limbo,” said Kate Hudson, a lawyer with the advocacy group Hudson Riverkeeper. “It’s still a real threat.”  Read more.

Albany Times Union: It looks like the state Department of Environmental Conservation can put off a decision on a long-delayed crude oil plan at the Port of Albany for bit longer.

Facing a court-ordered June 13 deadline to rule on a plan by Massachusetts-based Global Companies to heat crude oil for shipment, DEC obtained a stay in the Appellate Division of state Supreme Court that pushes off the deadline while the state appeals the earlier ruling.

Outside DEC headquarters on Broadway on Tuesday, more than two dozen protesters urged that DEC reject Global’s plan, which calls for a heating plant at the port that opponent fear would allow the company to handle thick Canadian tar sands oil.

Tar sands oil is so thick it must be heated during winter months so it can be pumped from railroad tank cars into land-based storage tanks, and then into barges or tankers on the Hudson River. This type of oil is also called diluted bitumen, or dilbit. Heavier than common crude oil, it sinks in water, making it very difficult to clean up from rivers and other waterbodies. Read more.

Kingston Daily Freeman: Oil train opponents rallied Tuesday, calling on the Department of Environmental Conservation to reject a proposal to bring Canadian tar sands oil over rail lines that run through upstate towns and cities and along the Hudson River.

“It would be almost impossible to clean up if it leaked into the Hudson,” said Mark Schaeffer, with 350.org and Citizen Action. “It’s ‘dilbit,’ diluted bitumen, which is not even a liquid at ordinary temperatures. That’s why they need to heat it, so it can flow enough to load it on barges. Tar sands is a very, very low-grade fossil fuel.”

In the event of an accident involving trains or barges, the oil would sink to the bottom of the river, making cleanup very difficult, he added.

The rail lines run north and south along the Hudson and on the west side of Lake Champlain, as well as east and west through the Mohawk Valley and western New York. Trains offload the oil to large ships docked at the Port of Albany, then head down the Hudson River. Billions of gallons of crude oil moving through the port annually.  Read more.

Earthjustice: A broad coalition consisting of the County of Albany, a tenants association, and several environmental groups filed a lawsuit today in federal court charging that a major crude-by-rail conglomerate is operating in violation of the Clean Air Act.

The lawsuit claims that Global Companies failed to obtain a required air pollution permit and institute necessary pollution controls when it modified its Albany, New York facility in 2012 to allow a five-fold increase in the amount of crude oil handled at the facility. The lawsuit also claims that Global has violated a permit issued by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation by handling crude oil from the Bakken region of North Dakota, which emits more air pollutants than conventional crude oil. The lawsuit seeks an injunction requiring the company to apply for the required air pollution permit and prohibiting the facility from handling Bakken crude oil, and asks for fines of $37,500 for each day that Global has operated in violation of the Clean Air Act.

The Global facility is located in Albany’s South End, which is home to residences, schools, churches, businesses, and social service agencies. The facility is directly adjacent to Ezra Prentice Homes, which has approximately 400 residents, including over 200 children. Albany’s South End has been designated an “environmental justice area” by DEC, meaning that it is an area that bears a disproportionate impact of adverse environmental impacts.

“The families who live at the Ezra Prentice Homes should not have to be exposed to hazardous air pollution from Global’s operations,” said Charlene Benton, president of the Ezra Prentice Homes Tenants Association. “The polluted air makes us sick and that’s just not right. We are going to court today to be granted the basic right to breathe clean air.”  Read more.

NRDC: In a stunning and laudable reversal, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has required Global Partners’ Port of Albany air permit application to undergo a full environmental review. Global’s air permit application is part of its plans to retrofit its existing Port of Albany crude-by-rail facility to allow it to begin handling tar sands crude oil from Alberta, Canada. The tar sands retrofit would require Global to install seven boilers that would be used to keep the tar sands warm as it is moved from rail cars into storage tanks. Eventually, this oil would be loaded onto barges and shipped down the Hudson River, destined for refineries in New Jersey, Delaware, and the Gulf Coast. Following receipt of 19,000 public comments and concerns from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, DEC has reversed its November 2013 finding that Global’s proposed project would “not have a significant environmental impact.” As one of the world’s most carbon-intensive crude oils whose production is laying waste to Alberta’s boreal forest, the DEC’s November 2013 finding flew in the face of what is known about the environmental impacts of adding tar sands oil to our fuel mix. What’s worse, infrastructure like Global’s proposed modifications would lock the region into at least 50 years of tar sands transport and use at a time when the region needs to transition to cleaner fuels, especially for transportation. Moving forward, DEC must seriously consider the cumulative and long-term impacts of approving this project on both Albany and the broader region.  Read more.

New York World: A pair of oil barges idling at the Port of Albany loomed over the waterfront recently, dwarfing two tugboats and a flock of seagulls that floated by on the Hudson River.

The barges, both 116 feet long and tethered to tugboats, were preparing for their trip south on the river, laden with oil. The tugboats that would guide them — the Dean Reinauer and the Reinauer Twins — are two of 14 tugboats that ferried crude oil barges down the Hudson River last year, according to ClipperData, a company that tracks the shipping industry.

It’s the last leg of a journey that began in the Bakken Shale Formation of North Dakota, where a recent oil boom has transformed the once-sleepy Port of Albany into a major transportation hub for domestic crude oil.While fiery train derailments across the U.S. and Canada have drawn New Yorkers’ attention to the dangers of transporting crude oil by rail, there has been much less focus on the potential dangers of shipping oil down the Hudson River by barge. But some environmentalists worry that a crude oil spill would wreak havoc on a river that has recovered well after enduring decades of industrial pollution that nearly destroyed it.

In addition, safety regulations governing tugboats have not been renewed despite a decade-old congressional directive; and the U.S. Coast Guard’s spill-response plans for the Hudson River were not updated after oil shipments began swelling four years ago.

“Everyone points to barge traffic as potentially having the most immediate catastrophic impact,” said Roger Downs, a director at the Sierra Club in Albany who has spent most of his life living by the river and working to revive it.  Read more.

Professional Mariner: Until two years ago, the southerly movement of crude oil by barge between the Midwest and the Gulf Coast was almost nonexistent.

As a result of a boom in domestic oil production — particularly in the Bakken Shale formation that stretches from western North Dakota into Montana and Canada — tug and barge companies have jumped into the “black gold” rush and experienced unprecedented growth.

Kirby Corp., the industry’s largest company, was the first to receive public attention for loading crude onto barges in 2012 and transporting it south to refineries in the lower Mississippi and the Gulf Coast. Kirby said 7 percent of its inland business is crude, as of the second quarter of 2014. Other companies have stepped forward to claim a piece of the business.

“For many, many decades, crude oil movement in this country has been south to north,” said Darrell Conner, a government affairs counselor and transportation and trade expert for K&L Gates, an international law firm. “Now it is reversed. It’s moving north to south. The same thing has happened in the tug industry.”

Matt Woodruff, Kirby’s director of government affairs and general counsel to the Inland Waterways Users Board, agreed.

“Oil is moving in a different direction; so is gas. What we’re seeing as a result of the shale plays is a renaissance of sorts,” he said. “Supply is coming from nontraditional sources and putting stresses on all modes of transportation to get the product to market.”

Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that stress, and the reason the tug and barge industry experienced such growth: In 2008, about 3.9 million barrels of crude were moved by barge from the Midwest to the Gulf Coast; in 2013, that number jumped to 46.7 million barrels.  Read more.

In a letter to New York environmental officials, Global Partners withdrew its permit applications to redevelop a former shipyard in Orange County into a rail transfer station so it could increase the amount of crude it sends down the Hudson to refineries.

Global already transports more than 3 million gallons of crude each day by barge from its terminal in Albany down the Hudson to the Bayway Refinery in Linden.

The company gave no reason for its withdrawal in its letter, and a company spokesman did not return a phone call Tuesday seeking comment.

Environmentalists, who say the oil shipments are a threat to the recovering waterway, greeted the news with cautious optimism.

“It’s certainly a good thing that these permit applications were withdrawn,” said Kate Hudson, a program director for Hudson Riverkeeper.

“What we don’t know is why. Is this a strategic move? How permanent is this?”

Read more.

As Staff Writer Scott Fallon reports, as much as 25 million gallons of crude oil per week is now making its way down the Hudson via oil tankers and barges. The steady clip of oil in the last few years mostly originates from the oil boom in North Dakota. It is transported by rail to Albany, N.Y., and then pumped onto several barges and a tanker that travels 145 miles down the Hudson, past Manhattan and through New York Harbor and on eventually to refineries in New Jersey and Canada.

We understand that the shipping of this oil has a great potential for the region’s economy. Oil executives say the crude shipments will help stir a still-moribund upstate New York economy, could revitalize refineries along the East Coast and eventually will bring down the price of gas.

Yet, as anyone old enough to remember the Exxon Valdez disaster can attest, it takes only one large-scale accident to make a catastrophic environmental event. As The Record reports, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration approved the rapid expansion of crude oil processing in Albany and is now calling for development of better emergency response plans in the case of spills.  Read more.

NRDC: The future health of the Hudson River depends heavily on decisions that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation must make soon. That may sound like the-sky-is-falling overstatement, but it’s not. New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo seems pretty worried, too.

On January 28, Cuomo recognized the seriousness of at least part of this issue with an executive order calling for a group of state agencies, including DEC, to study shipments of crude oil in the state and report back to him by April 30. He directed them to make recommendations on how New York can both coordinate better with federal agencies and improve its own ability “to prevent and respond to accidents involving the transportation of crude oil and other petroleum products by rail, ship, and barge.”

This executive order did not come out of the blue. The governor was reacting to a series of catastrophic oil accidents. Right at the top of the document, he cited two of them. One took place last July 26, when a train carrying crude oil derailed in Lac-Mégantic, Québec. The horrific result: fire and explosion causing 47 deaths, the destruction of the community, and mass evacuations. Then, on December 30, a derailment in Casselton, ND, spilled more than 400,000 gallons of crude oil, caused a fire, and forced more than 1,000 residents to evacuate.

Those accidents may seem remote, but rail-to-barge shipments of crude oil are arriving daily in the Port of Albany, destined for refineries in the Mid-Atlantic states. The trains are traveling both eastward, along the Mohawk River, and southward, from Canada, along Lake Champlain. At the Port of Albany, the rail cars transfer their volatile cargo to barges, which head down the Hudson.

Much of this oil originates in the Bakken formation in North Dakota. Two things are worth noting about Bakken oil: first, as the governor pointed out in his executive order, “Bakken crude oil has a lower flashpoint and is therefore more prone to ignite during a rail accident.” Second, as he also acknowledged, the production of Bakken oil is increasing. That crude, the governor said, “due to lack of pipeline capacity, must be transported by rail.”

That is where DEC’s role becomes crucial. In November 2012, the agency approved an application by Global Companies LLC to change its existing permit and double the storage and loading capacity for Bakken oil at the Port of Albany. And that’s not doubling a trivial amount.

“Within the past year, over one billion gallons of explosive Bakken crude oil has been shipped into the Port by rail; hundreds of crude oil rail cars are being stored just feet away from homes and playgrounds; and long lines of crude oil rail cars routinely stretch for miles along Route 787 through the heart of downtown Albany,” said a January 30 letter to DEC Commissioner Joseph Martens, which NRDC endorsed. “All of this has occurred without the thorough environmental review required by state law, and without any attempt to engage the residential communities that are bearing the brunt of this unprecedented industrial activity as required by the Department’s Environmental Justice Policy.”

That policy grew out of concerns in the late 1990s that DEC’s permitting process was not taking into account disproportionate environmental impacts on low-income and minority communities—and wasn’t doing enough to hear the voices of these communities. As an agency, the DEC now has a clear policy on environmental justice.  Read more.

Riverkeeper: With very little public awareness and no study of environmental impacts, the oil industry has made the Hudson Valley into one arm of a dangerous “virtual pipeline” for crude oil that snakes thousands of miles by rail, barge and ship from oil fields in North Dakota, Canada and elsewhere, to refineries on both coasts.

The New York State segment of this “virtual pipeline” primarily moves a particularly volatile crude oil by rail from the Bakken shale formation of North Dakota and nearby states and provinces, where oil production has doubled in three years, to the Port of Albany. There, billions of gallons of crude oil can be offloaded onto barges and ships destined for East Coast refineries. Additional trains loaded with crude oil destined for refineries to the south continue along the west side of the Hudson River, through communities in Greene, Ulster, Orange and Rockland counties. Some of these trains carry Canadian tar sands crude bitumen, and there are proposals that would facilitate the shipment of heavy crudes like this by barge as well.

The potential human and environmental impacts of this “virtual pipeline” are anything but virtual. The Hudson River, its tributaries and every community along the river or the freight rail line are at risk from spills and fires.  Read more.