An aerial view of the Port of Tacoma. The port learned Friday that a $150 million bulk liquids distribution facility at the port's Hylebos Waterway property.
Flickr/Derrick Coetzee
There’s news today out of Tacoma, Wash. that a train-to-ship oil transport hub is falling by the wayside.
That’s been a theme for more than a year for a region where many such projects involving another carbon-emitting fuel -- coal -- have been canceled.
The News Tribune's John Gillie reports this afternoon that the Port of Tacoma got a "Dear Port" letter Friday from Targa Sound, announcing the company was dropping its plans to build a $150 million bulk liquids distribution facility at the port. A lot of those bulk liquids would have been oil transported in by train from the oil patch in North Dakota known as the Bakken oil field.
That picks up where the region’s pattern for coal-export projects has left off. Since August, 2012, three of the Northwest’s six proposed coal export terminals have been dropped by their investors: one on the Washington Coast’s Gray’s Harbor, A second on Coos Bay on the southern Oregon coast, and the third on the Oregon side of the Columbia River near Clatskanie.
Catch up on the details with our Coal Scorecard.
In the case of the Tacoma oil project, the company behind the project concluded after seven months of study that its new tank farm just wouldn’t be economically viable, The News Tribune reported.
We’ll be watching to see what happens elsewhere in the Northwest, where several oil-by-train shipping proposals are under consideration.
-- David Steves
Click markers for details. Blue: proposed. Red: underway. Yellow: canceled.