The Uinta Basin Railway Would Be a Bigger Carbon Bomb Than Willow

The proposed Uinta Basin Railway (UBR) would run 88 miles between the Uinta Basin and Kyune, Utah, where it would meet Union Pacific’s national railway system. This connection would allow oil trains to transport Uinta Basin crude through Colorado, and alongside the Colorado River for hundreds of miles, as they make their way south and east to refineries in Texas and Louisiana. 

With the railway in place, the Uinta Basin’s oil industry could potentially quadruple its current output, adding up to 350,000 barrels per day in new crude oil extraction. For comparison, the Willow drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope—the one that sparked international outrage after its approval by the federal government—would produce 180,000 oil barrels per day at its peak. In the end, the Uinta Basin Railway could unleash a whopping 53 million metric tons (or 58.5 million tons) of carbon pollution into the atmosphere each year.

The UBR would send up to 10 trains along the Colorado River every day, each stretching 2 miles long and carrying 100 tanker cars of heated crude through narrow canyons and along steep mountainsides. Even the STB’s substandard environmental impact statement acknowledged that such an increase in rail traffic could bring a derailment every single year. With so many depending on a river that’s already struggling under the weight of prolonged drought and regular overdraws, an oil disaster on the Colorado River is simply not a risk worth taking.

It cannot be overstated how important the Colorado River is to this corner of the country. In an increasingly parched West, the river provides drinking water to 40 million people, from Wyoming to Mexico. The waterway also supports $15 billion in U.S. agriculture and $150 million in hydropower, and more than two dozen Tribes rely on the Colorado to sustain their ways of life.

“A spill from a massive oil train would affect everything downstream and have catastrophic, lingering effects,” says Hattie Johnson of American Whitewater, a nonprofit working to protect rivers and the recreation industries they support. “It's a beautiful, remote section of river that provides an incredible experience, so just the impact of the train traffic itself would be concerning,” she says, adding that, in 2022, the stretch of river the trains would imperil generated $36 million through commercial rafting alone. 

Via the railway, at least 85 percent of Uinta Basin crude oil would be headed for the Gulf Coast, an all-too-popular destination for the fossil fuel industry and other big polluters. Low-income areas and communities of color—such as those within Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” and Port Arthur, Texas, home to one of the world’s largest oil refinery complexes—have been grappling with astronomically high levels of air pollution for decades. Pointing out the disproportionate and cumulative health and economic burdens they already shoulder, residents urged the Biden administration to reject the railway. 

“Enough is enough. We refuse to be sacrificed any further,” says John Beard Jr., executive director of the Port Arthur Community Action Network, a local environmental justice group. Beard, a former refinery worker, says that his community will no longer trade its health and its children’s future so that companies can make billions in profit. “We don’t want it. We don’t need it,” he says of the Utah crude. “We're going to keep fighting tooth and nail to prevent this from happening. We’re going to fight until we win.” 

Environmentalists have also been mobilizing against the Uinta Basin’s expansion on other fronts. For one, they urged the Forest Service to reverse its 2022 decision to allow the railway to cut through a federally protected roadless area in Ashley National Forest. The project involved building five bridges and blasting three large tunnels in public forestland deemed by the Roadless Rule to “possess social and ecological values and characteristics that are becoming scarce in our nation’s increasingly developed landscape.”

The Forest Service rescinded its approval in early 2024, but it could feasibly change course once again, given the country’s current political and regulatory climate. Even so, other headwinds remain that give hope this project will never be built. The railway’s cost continues to balloon, and the coalition of counties proposing the project recently confirmed their ongoing intent to try and finance the project with federal transportation bonds. The only problem? The government is running out of funds to support further projects.

Environmentalists have also been fighting another Uinta project that would serve as a partial workaround in case the railway doesn’t pan out. This comes in the form of a separate proposal to truck more crude out of the Uinta Basin through the Wildcat Loadout Facility, an oil train terminal near Price, Utah, that also connects with the national rail network. Right now, about 100 tanker trucks head down US 191 each day from the Uinta Basin to Wildcat. The trucks drive through the arid mountainscape carrying 30,000 barrels of oil, but under the new plan—which would increase the terminal’s storage and loading capacity—there’d be another 260 of them hauling 100,000 barrels per day. The result would be one oil-filled tanker truck passing by every four minutes all day, every day. 

Since the Wildcat facility is located on federal land, the project proponents now have all the approvals they need to move forward—assuming low oil prices won’t detract them. For now, the ultimate fates of both the railway and the Wildcat trucking proposal remain unknown, but one thing is certain: The pro-drilling set is determined to lay the groundwork to get more oil out of Utah. 

“We'll continue to respond to ever-changing proposals that'll come up,” says Johnson. “We’re by no means done. There’s plenty of work to do.”

This story was originally published December 13, 2023, and has since been updated with new information and links.