When the Chinese company Northwest Innovation Works (NWIW) showed up in 2014 to pitch their methanol refinery to the Port of Kalama, local resident Diane Dick knew it was bad news: “We’re not fossil fuel people.” As she explains, the area was once host to the world’s largest sawmill. Lumber is what the community understands. NWIW “knew we didn’t know about petrochemicals.” Right from the get-go, Dick says, the company tried to “cover up, obfuscate and manipulate data” to promote their plans to build the world’s largest methane to methanol refinery in the small riverside town. The methanol would be used in China to make plastic.
Like others in a long parade of trans-national fossil fuel corporations, NWIW wants to refashion the Pacific Northwest into a hub for fossil fuel processing and export. Cheap electricity, abundant water and ready access to Asian markets make the region ideal. The company has already signed a lease option with the Port of Columbia County to build a second, equally large refinery on the Oregon side of the Columbia River to make methanol from fracked gas (methane). They are banking on illiteracy of the science of fossil fuels and climate change among local officials and residents. What they have failed to count on was people like Dick. After six years, NWIW has not won the permits it needs to break ground in Kalama.
Diane Dick does not have a degree in science, but she has a knack for it. “I’m a numbers person,” she says. So when NWIW came to town, she rolled up her sleeves. “It wasn’t what I wanted to do,” she admits, “spend a Saturday night researching what was involved in cracking.” (Cracking, she explains, is a process involved in the refining of petroleum.) But she understands what’s at stake: not only the beauty, tranquility and (relatively) unspoiled environment of the Pacific Northwest, but the pressing need to avert climate disaster. The methanol refinery would dump 4.6 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year for 40 years. Double that number if NWIW also builds in Oregon. According to the EPA, 4.6 million metric tons is equivalent to the annual emissions of nearly one million passenger cars.
For Sally Keely, it’s not Saturday nights. It’s what she laughingly calls her “methanol Mondays,” the day she devotes each week to researching her opposition to the refinery. Keely, also a long-term resident of the Kalama community, is another foot soldier in a small army of citizen scientists at the forefront of resistance to the fossil fuel industry. She’s holds an M.S. and has taught mathematics at Clark College for 25 years. Numbers don’t intimidate her. But fossil fuel energy science? “That was all new to me,” she says.
Keely is skeptical of all of NWIW’s numbers, because “they lie so much.” She’s made it her job to figure out where they get their numbers. It’s not easy. In the 2019 Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, for example, NWIW used a methane leakage rate of .32% to calculate how much methane would escape into the atmosphere through normal operations. That struck Keely as egregiously — and self-servingly — low. Rates of methane leakage are highly controversial. According to a 2015 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists, estimates have ranged from 1 to 9%, depending on study methodology, geology, industrial practices, infrastructure condition and a host of other factors. The rate of .32% turned out to be “cherry-picked”, Keely says, from a Canadian grad student paper.
Part of the problem, as Dan Serres of Columbia Riverkeeper points out, is that the science of methane is dominated by the gas industry, which is itself proprietary, secretive, and poorly regulated. Or as the New York Times put it in their 2019 exposé of methane leakage, emissions are “loosely regulated, difficult to detect and rising sharply.”
Serres, a native Oregonian, holds an inter-disciplinary degree in Environmental Science, but admits that he was a lightweight in the science department and prefers history. He’s been dogging the fossil fuel industry in the Pacific Northwest for close to two decades. He thinks the methane leakage rate has become a “distraction from the big picture,” that is, the overall impact of the refinery on global warming.
The big picture was precisely what was missing from the initial Environmental Impact Statement in 2016. In that analysis, NWIW and local officials failed to take into consideration any greenhouse gas emissions beyond the footprint of the Kalama facility. Citizen scientists cried foul. Subsequent calculations by the Washington State Department of Ecology would show that only about 20% of the total greenhouse gas emissions due to the project would come from the site itself. In other words, the document obscured 80% of the total impact on global carbon emissions. Facing an avalanche of protest state regulators told NWIW to go back to the drawing board and produce a life cycle analysis.
A life cycle analysis counts all greenhouse gas emissions related to a project, including those from the extraction, transport, processing, storage and end-use of the product. Excluding this analysis is a common ploy used by the industry (also by Trump’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) to conceal the overall climate effects of fossil fuels. It’s like telling yourself that the calories from the doughnuts you eat every day at work don’t count because you don’t eat them at home. It represents yet another deployment of junk science: data that is outdated, manipulated, cherry-picked or lacking in evidence.
In 2019, NWIW, in collaboration with the Port of Kalama and Cowlitz County, produced its Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement with a life cycle analysis under the banner headline: “Proposed Kalama Methanol Plant to Bring Dramatic Greenhouse Gas Reductions.” The analysis purported to prove that the plant, because it would replace coal-derived feedstocks for plastic production, would result in a net reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions.
But the science was all wrong. This was the document that deployed the .32% methane leakage rate that Sally Keely balked at. The analysis also used an outdated metric for the potency of methane as a greenhouse gas that low-balled its effect by 25%. Plus it quantified the effect of methane emissions spread out over 100 instead of 20 years. Policy makers rely on both the 100- and 20-year standards, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as the EPA caution against using the 100-year standard for short-lived methane. This is because methane’s greenhouse gas effect is much more severe in the first dozen years after release and then tapers off considerably. Averaging out that impact over 100 years reduces its apparent impact by nearly threefold. It’s like telling yourself that eating two doughnuts a day for 10 years won’t be so bad because in the following decades you’ll work some fresh fruit into your diet. Never mind that you could be dead of diabetes by then.
Citizen scientists tore the analysis to shreds. The Department of Ecology agreed.
As Diane Dick writes in a pugnacious op-ed for her local press, the environmental review was supervised by local jurisdictions, which had “no experience in petrochemical permitting” and were not prepared to evaluate or manage an environmental assessment of this magnitude and technical complexity. That’s one reason fossil fuel corporations try to site their projects in smaller jurisdictions with fewer resources and which are usually hungry for jobs and tax revenue.
At this point, the Department of Ecology took over the process. The second supplement to the Environmental Impact Statement, meant to address the shortcomings of the first, was prepared with the assistance of for-profit consulting firms hired by the Department of Ecology. It was released in September of this year for public comment. It, too, comes to the conclusion that a massive methane to methanol refinery in Kalama to produce feedstock for the manufacture of plastics in China would be a good thing for global warming.
Dan Serres has no problem with the science of the second supplement until, he says, it stops being science and veers into wild speculation. It’s an “absurd discussion...that missed the fundamental crisis” of global warming. Diane Dick is more blunt in her assessment. “It’s the same old crap.” What they are referring to is the so-called “emission sensitivity model” of the supplement, which is actually a market analysis of fossil fuels and their products. The analysis “proves” that methanol is great because it’s better than coal. As Dick notes, they’ve chosen the lowest possible standard. Alternative, low-carbon ways to produce plastics, like bio-based feedstocks, are not even considered in the analysis, presumably because they are currently priced out of the market. It’s as if every single medical expert tells you to quit the doughnuts altogether because now you’ve developed diabetes, but you decide that eating a cake doughnut every day instead of a glazed one would be a reasonable first step. And besides, doughnuts are cheap compared to fresh fruit.
The market analysis derives its numbers from speculations and assumptions without much evidence. The model, for example, assumes that at most 40% of the methanol produced would be diverted from plastics manufacturing to be used as a fuel. This matters, because, according to the document itself, using methanol as a fuel instead of for plastics increases its total greenhouse gas emissions by a factor of 2.6. The 40/60 split (fuel/plastics), Serres says, seems to be pulled out of thin air.
As recently as 2019 NWIW was telling local authorities 100% of its methanol would be used for plastics. But then a presentation from NWIW to its investors that directly contradicted this prediction was leaked to Columbia Riverkeeper and published by Oregon Public Broadcasting. The NWIW presentation describes in glowing terms the growing “market opportunity” for selling methanol as a fuel to the Chinese, a market they projected would outstrip the market in plastics. Apparently mindful of this duplicity, the market analysis projects the use of methanol for plastics not at 100%, but only 60%. Their evidence? Current market trends projected decades into an uncertain future and the fact that NWIW has “indicated that they are targeting the [plastics] market.” In essence, the model takes speculation and corporate intention (which NWIW has already been caught mis-stating to regulators), converts them into a number and passes it off as objective analysis. Citizen scientists were not fooled.
But it gets worse. At the heart of the model is the proposition that “scenarios with substantially different global policies (fossil fuel/plastics phase outs or bans for example) are too uncertain to include in this analysis.” Which is to say that the kind of environmental regulations that are needed to avert climate disaster are dismissed out of hand as factors to take into consideration. To Serres, it’s “a dismal way to look at things, that it can never be regulated.” It is also a value judgment in the guise of objectivity, a judgment that recognizes nothing but the market as a governing force in human life. It’s a peculiarly cynical stance for a regulatory agency to take.
In evaluating the NWIW proposal, many in the Pacific Northwest look beyond the market for answers as they face a number of critical questions: What sacrifices are we willing to make for what gains? How can we be fair, compassionate and democratic in our choices? How should we relate to the natural world? How do we want to live? Science, Sally Keely says, “is my guide to analyzing these questions...This does not diminish my emotional connection with our earth and environment, it enhances it. I can marvel at how scientific processes produce a gorgeous sunset, a naturally filtered stream, and rock formations.”
Diane Dick would agree. Science, she says, is but one lens on reality and has value when practiced with integrity and transparency. “Science can inform, but it can’t make you care.” Other lenses, she notes, include spiritual beliefs, cultural mores and moral imperatives. As for sacrifice, Keely has no problem giving up the doughnuts. But she is very clear about what she is not willing to sacrifice: “clean air, clean water, good health and well-being.”
Note: The Department of Ecology’s final decision on the key shoreline permit for the Kalama methanol refinery is expected by the end of December. On Nov. 23, a federal court in Tacoma vacated two water permits previously granted to NWIW by the Army Corps of Engineers due to inadequate assessments of the impact on the local environment and global greenhouse emissions.