FACTS about the Proposed
Methanol Refinery and Export TerminalBackground:
- Northwest Innovation Works (NWIW) is a limited liability company established in 2014. NWIW is a controlled foreign entity of the Chinese Party State (the CPC), the only company the Chinese Academy of Sciences Holdings (CASH) has spun outside China.
- NWIW has never built or operated a methanol refinery (despite lies about methanol on the Columbia River). They'll use a new production process (ULE) never tested on this scale.
- By far the largest methanol refinery in the world. About as large as all 7 existing U.S. methanol refineries combined. Will produce 3.65 million metric tonnes per year compared to next largest Iran's Kaveh mega methanol refinery at 2M t/yr.
- The same players left Pocatello Idaho in shambles when they cut and run from a smaller but similar plant.
This single refinery would:
9/2 UPDATE: Ecology's DSSEIS finds 4.6 million metric tons CO2e pollution added to our atmosphere every year for 40 years. (Source: DSSEIS table 3-5.11)
Thus Kalama Methanol Refinery would equal 5% of the state’s total climate emissions from all other activities combined! (Source: Sightline Institute analysis)
KMR = Climate Disaster |
- Add a staggering 12 million tons of carbon pollution to the atmosphere every year. (1.076 million tons of GHG from the facility alone + up to about 5.5 million tons mostly from "upstream" methane leakage (extraction, pipelines) + 5.44 million tons when the end use methanol is burned as a fuel.)
- Increase WA state's total fracked fossil-gas use by 38%,
using 2½ times all the gas Seattle and Portland use.
Consume 320 million cubic feet of "natural" gas per day,
more gas than all other industries in WA combined
likely requiring expanded/parallel gas pipelines from B.C.
- Increase WA state's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Become WA's top climate polluter by 2025.
- Obligate us to 40+ years of fossil fuel infrastructure.
Fracked fossil-gas pipelines leak methane!
Plus:
- Eminent domain (for foreign-owned corporate gain, not public gain) is being used to seize land from local homeowners and an historic cemetery in order for Williams NW Pipeline LLC to build a new 3.1 mile 24" lateral pipeline whose sole purpose is to feed fracked methane gas to the refinery. MAPS: [route | homes & cemetery | interactive (in Google Earth)]
- Only 2 permanent jobs per acre most not hired from Cowlitz Co.
NWIW already applied for H-1B visas for Chinese workers.
- Steam plumes from the Kalama methanol refinery would disrupt views Kalama homeowners value. Steam plumes would be taller than Mount St. Helens (8,366 feet) 25% of the time it’s operating (FEIS Appendix D pg 60 table 16).
- Methanol to be sold on open market with NO guarantee where it will be used or for what purpose (eg, to be burned as transportation fuel, used to make plastics to further clog our oceans, ...)
- NWIW says global GHGs will be reduced by China replacing coal-to-methanol with methane-to-methanol but provides NO proof. Further, if NWIW cared about the damage coal does to our air, why do they fully support Millennium Coal plant in Longview?
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Taxpayers on the hook for the entire $2 Billion and Port of Kalama's Subsidies Would Violate Federal ‘Double Dipping’ Rules.
- Methanol is a toxic volatile petrochemical. Methanol fires are invisible to the human eye. Recent explosions have been deadly.
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