Plans continue to advance for the construction of an 88-mile-long railroad that will start out in the Uinta Basin of Utah and slice through parts of Colorado on the way to a national railroad connection.
What is known as the Uinta Basin Railway could, according to estimates, cost nearly $3 billion to build, and upon completion transport on some ten trains upwards of 350,000 barrels of crude oil on a daily basis.
The project has been talked about on and off since the early 1980s but became a much more substantive proposal nearly a decade ago with the formation of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition in Utah, which has its headquarters in the city of Price.
That group has since been pushing for what has become a public/private partnership including the railroad holding company Rio Grande Pacific Corporation. Nearly two years ago construction of the project was given a green light by the Surface Transportation Board.
A move is now underway to secure up to $2 billion in tax-exempt private activity bonds to help fund the project’s construction.
Opposition to the project has come from within Utah, but especially in Colorado where environmental groups have argued that the railroad could negatively impact both the state’s environment as well as any community located near the route of the Uinta Basin Railway.
Earlier this spring Colorado Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper sent a letter to the federal Department of Transportation opposing the project and in particular the issuance of the private activity bonds to fund it.
The project, the Senators argued, will “undermine President Biden’s priority of addressing the climate crisis, and harm communities through which these oil trains will travel and where this oil will be refined.”
The Transportation Department has yet to make a final ruling on whether to approve the Uinta Basin Railway’s application for those private activity bonds.
By Garry Boulard
