From reading railroad trade magazines of the mid-1970’s, I have learned that there was talk of construction of a coal slurry pipeline from the major coal fields to power plants elsewhere in the country – like Arkansas. The system would have drawn water from sources in Montana. Naturally, there was opposition by railroads, and also by citizens of Montana who did not want water resources used in this way.
Below are two pieces of published commentary that seem to capture both the opposition of the BN railroad, and of Montana citizens.
I don’t have any specific questions for the forum on this topic. I just thought I would post here to read the discussion that might follow. I encourage any first-time posters who were “there” to post their recollections.
Exhibit 1. News editorial from Lewiston, News-Argus
Coal Slurry
Suppose someone proposed building a 38 inch pipeline from Montana to Arkansas to pipe our Treasure State water to the Southern state. There would be an awful howl, and well there should be as water is one of our most precious possessions. It should be kept in Montana as much as possible for local development that will create added opportunities, jobs, and tax aids for Montanans.
Yet such a 38-inch pipeline is proposed to reach for 1036 miles from near Gillette in Wyoming to White Bluff in Arkansas. It would cost $750 million and carry 25 million tons of slurry coal (coal in liquid form) to power plants in Arkansas every year. People in that state and South Dakota (both would be hit by the withdrawal of the water) are up in arms. They want the water for use in their own states and, we think, quite rightly so.
Incidentally, Montana too should be concerned, as some of the water that would be tapped flows through the Treasure State too on the surface and under the ground.
The railroads between the Powder River Basin and the Midwest refused to give the pipeline easements under their right of ways. Later, they paid millions in legal settlements but by then pipeline was dead, dead, dead. In think the railroads were foolish, the states would never have let the water been exported out of the drought prone High Plains.
Bob’s memory is better than mine. The “legal settlements” he refers to were judgments from anti-trust suits which found that several railroads conspired to drive at least one of the pipeline companies out of business.
He’s also right about the water issue - a populist “hot button” - and the railroads were also successful in using the political process by lobbying to prevent Congress from granting “eminent domain” / condemnation rights to the coal slurry pipelines to obtain easements and rights-of-way across those railroads, parks, your lawn, etc.
But I suspect the biggest nail in the coffin was the development and refinement of unit train operations, which drove the cost of transporting coal by rail down to the point where the pipeline was not competitive. Although, in view of later 1980’s and 1990’s price increases by BN, one could argue that it was priced too low in the late 1970’s - whether mistakenly or deliberately to preclude the pipeline competition, who can say ?
Finally, the cost of money - capital - to invest in the pipeline soared in the late 1970’s - my first mortgage in July 1980 was at 11-3/4%, and at the time we thought we got a pretty good deal. For the huge amount of all-new money that the pipeline would have needed to get built, those interest costs were an economic ‘show-stopper’.
Was there also some concern with what to do with water after delivery? Pollution control/water treatment at the end of the line would also add to the cost.
To add to the mix: Then Governor Bill Janklow of South Dakota tried to sell water from the Missouri River to ETSI, a pipeline development company. That didn’t set well with downstream states who didn’t think it was his to sell. That also caused some controversy with state residents as well. The water pipeline would have run from the Missouri River west, through the driest parts of S.D. and Wyoming.
ATSF a big loser in coal-slurry antitrust case - Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Co.# $285 million from 3 other western railroads, plus a verdict against ATSF for another $345 million in this case.# - Paul North.
I ‘fumble-fingered’ and apparently inadvertently trashed my supplemental post on this, so the best I can do right now is to provide the links to 2 Federal Appeals Court opinions, and recommend their ‘background’ sections for review and a lopt more information on all this, especially ETSI = Energy Transportation System, Inc.'s universal success in obtaining easements to cross railroad ROWs by acquisition of rights from the adjoining/ underlying fee owners and then 'Quiet Title 'litigation against the railroad, and the South Dakota water rights dispute:
Has anyone considered that the coal slurry pipeline proponents were actually looking toward what was the end result - get large sums through litigation. This supposes that the RR’s would react just as they did.
What if the RR’s had instead said - if coal slurry is the way our country wishes to go then we already have the ROW in place??
This question might be a little off topic but if the coal slurry is used to generate electricity, wouldn’t it be better to generate electricity near the coal fields and build a new transmission line or just pump it into the existing electrical grid and take it out in Askansas. This seems like a better soultion than even shipping by rail. Would there be that much loss in a very high voltage dc transmission line?
That’s usually called a “mine-mouth” plant. Unfortunately, it suffers from one problem the same as the coal slurry pipeline - lack of water. The plant needs large quantities of cooling water for its steam turbines to run efficiently - why, I can’t explain well, so I’ll leave it to a mechanical engineer or someone else who understands thermodynamics and heat engines well - and that amount of water is scarce and hence zealously guarded in those coal field regions.
I understand that the line losses with Ultra-High Voltage DC transmission are very low - but most lines are not that kind yet - darn near none, commercially. Also, I believe they have to be super-cooled to function that way. Again, I’ll defer to someone with more expertise on the technology.
So it may well be cheaper to haul the coal than pay the capital cost for thousands of miles of the new tranmission lines. Plus, the coal can be shipped to different plants as needs vary - the transmission lines are fixed.
When I first posted this thread, I had mistakenly understood that the slurry pipeline was to originate in Montana. But I realize now it was to start in Wyoming (where the coal is). Only the water was the come from Montana (and other states). Makes sense to me now (duh).
Anyway, I have been looking through a half dozen BN railroad employee magazines circa 1976, and all of them have editorial comments in them that are anti-pipeline. The comment above from Lou Menk is one. Many of the editorial bits in the magazine are also from the point of view of Montana. I gather from this ongoing information campaign that it was a very big deal for BN to win this fight.
There was one major coal slurry pipeline in the US, from 1969 to 2005 - 273 miles from the Black Mesa Coal Mine in NE Arizona to the Mohave Generating Station at Laughlin, Nevada. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_pipeline
I believe there was also a shorter coal slurry pipeline that was actually placed into operation - a ‘demonstration’ or kind of ‘beta test’ back in that day, if you will - somewhere in the eastern US, such as from Kentucky to Ohio, etc. It operated for a few years, but was ‘mothballed’ when undercut by unit train rates.
The coal slurry pipeline was to start at the coal fields in the Powder River Basin near Gillette, Wyoming. I lived there at the time. That area is probably technically a desert. It is dryer than dry. There are no trees. The landscpae is about 50% scrub and short grass, 50% red dirt where nothing grows. Everything is covered with a layer of fine dust. I worked in a lumber yard. When you walked around in the yard, you left footprints in the dust. There was one little stream through town that dried up in the summer. Local water had so much sulfer in it, that it tasted like rotten eggs. Resataurants did not give you water unless you asked. Most also would give you lemon juice to kill the taste.
Railroad opposition was one hurdle. The bigger hurdle was the lack of water. A good case could be made for the idea that the whole coal slurry pipeline was nothing more than a way to force the rail prices down.
A side note: At the time, Gillette had big expectations for the coal slurry pipeline, and a project to turn coal into gasoline, called the Hampshire Energy project. Construction, jobs, economic development, money-money-money!! Both of these projects fell off a cliff within a couple weeks of each other, and the local economy went right down the drain. You had to get in line to move out town.
In about 1984 I went through Gillette on a road trip. It looked like a boom town. Work trucks everywhere. Coal trains passing through with a variety of locomotives – BN, Milwaukee Road, MKT.
One of the other factors that even ended the ‘demo’ pipline was the more severe than expected abrasion of the coal to the pipeline. All in all, the slurry idea had too many techincal and political issues.
Interesting. I had not considered abrasion. But it makes sense. I have heard that the trans-Alaska, crude oil pipe-line is subject to some abrasion due to sand suspended in the crude oil. Abrasion from coal slurry must be considerably worse than crude oil.
To get a good “bottom” on the heat cycle. The greater the temp difference between the high and the low temp in the cycle, the more efficient - in general.
The legal side of this slurries vs railroads issue looks interesting. A quick google turned up a lot of literature. Here is a preview of a NY Times letter that picqued my interest:
“To the Editor: Your Aug. 24 editorial about coal slurry pipelines was factually deficient. The focal point of railroad opposition to such pipelines is not the right of eminent domain but the matter of whether Congress should legislate special benefits to them when such benefits are not accorded to railroads.”
I will have to do some research and see what I can learn.
I’m somewhat familiar with the ETSI antitrust case against various railroads, although I wasn’t directly involved with it One of the things that made this case difficult for the railroads is that they don’t seem to have been very cognizant of antirust concerns in the various private measures they took against the project. As a general matter, it’s OK for competing companies to collectively try to get government action that disables c
No reason to bow out. I never let the number of stars someone has accorded a thread be a determining factor in whether I read or participate in a thread. After all, we all have different tastes and intersests. The number of responses and the amount of discussion a thread produces should be a much better measure of the subject interest at hand.
Edit: Just to show how frivolous the star thingy is, I tagged it as 5 stars. The system then seems to average it, so now the topic has 3 stars. [{(-_-)}]