 GCN Special Report
Government by Subterfuge By Keith Burton – GulfCoastNews.com Filed 11/11/07 GCN The U.S. Department of Energy has been quietly planning to extend the nation’s Strategic Oil Reserve by establishing a new repository made from a salt dome, a natural formation, located in Richton, Mississippi. Richton is in Perry County just east of Hattiesburg. The DOE’s plan calls for hollowing out the salt dome
by using water pumped from the Pascagoula River, and Normally, a project this massive would involve numerous public hearings and environmental assessments, also heavily attended by the public, who would rightly be concerned over the impact of the project. But until a recent news report in the Mobile Press Register regarding the DOE plan, the public did not know. Why? The DOE held their preliminary public hearings just over a month immediately after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
That is short answer to the lack of concern by the public over this issue. But there is more at stake. One would think that on such a project that represents multi-billions of dollars in federal funds, and a huge environmental impact, the DOE would have postponed the public hearings for a much later date. That did not happen. Instead, the program continued forward as if there was very little public concern. Federal records indicate just that. The Richton site is nothing new to the DOE. As far back as the late 1980’s and early 1990’s the Richton site has been examined by the federal government as a potential site for oil storage. Not even a year after the initial cancelled public hearings, the DOE held another series of meetings, which was attended by one Coast official and an area environmentalist. Jackson County Supervisor Frank Leach and Becky Gillette of the Sierra Club in Ocean Springs both expressed alarm at that meeting over the lack of public awareness of the project. The DOE responded saying they had sent the notices to the newspapers and local government offices. According to federal records, a Notice of Availability for the draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was published on May 26, 2006. The comment period for the draft EIS ended on July 10, 2006, 45 days later. During the comment period, DOE held five public hearings between June 20, 2006, and June 28, 2006, in Pascagoula, MS; Richton, MS; Port Gibson, MS; Lake Jackson, TX; and Houma, LA. DOE received oral or written comments from the following: 9 elected officials; 15 government agencies; 8 companies or other organizations; and 76 individuals. The Richton Salt Dome project is seen as needed to get the Strategic Oil Reserve up to 1 billion barrels of oil. There are other salt domes used for storing oil in Louisiana and they were also made by hollowing the domes with the use of water. Several domes were made using water pumped from the Gulf of Mexico. Salt domes are also considered usable for storing nuclear wastes. The domes are considered impregnable and durable for long term use. While the Richton Salt Dome has been studied as a possible nuclear waste storage site, the current DOE plan states their interest is for oil storage, a far more publicly acceptable use. Still, the construction of the Richton site is slowly drawing fire from residents on the Coast and elsewhere. There are concerns by some, that with oil at nearly $100 a barrel, a cost not foreseen at the time of the project’s initiation, that the Richton Salt Dome for oil project is not what will actually happen. Just purchasing the oil at $100 a barrel to fill the planned 160-million barrel capacity of the Richton Salt Dome would cost the federal government $1.6 billion, and this figure does not include the money to lay the pipes across miles of South Mississippi and construct the cavern in the dome. There is no telling what oil will cost by the time the project is completed. The DOE’s plan is to draw some 50 million gallons of water a day for five years from the Pascagoula River to hollow out the dome, then pump the super-salty slurry to an offshore location near the barrier islands. The DOE records imply they don’t expect dumping the salt slurry to create much of a problem. This is disputed by marine biologists. Biologist say the salty mixture discharge exceeds the natural level of salinity so much it would become a dead-zone to the area’s marine life. In addition, wildlife management officials feel certain that so much water being withdrawn from the Pascagoula River would be harmful to the river, especially since the region has experienced a long-running drought. And while salt domes are believed stable, that assessment may be unwarranted. The Richton Salt Dome sits above a deep aquifer that supplies water to many residents in South Mississippi. This past Nov. 1, Fox News reported that the DOE and the State of South Carolina announced their intention to close, in 2008, one of the nation’s three low-level nuclear storage facilities. This site is the Barnwell County dump site, a 235-acre expanse that opened in 1971 close to the Georgia line. The site is used by some 36 states to dispose of mostly low-level nuclear wastes generated by industrial and medical facilities. No mention of why the site the site was being closed was in the Fox story, but later, on Nov. 11, the Sun News in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina reported in a small, almost buried story, that there are concerns over nuclear tritium infiltrating groundwater at the site. Some state officials now say the DOE has not been as forthcoming as they should have been and the site probably should have been closed sooner. The Georgia site is not in a salt dome, but the DOE has become concerned over recent years of a growing tritium problem in ground water around nuclear waste sites and nuclear power plants. The Richton Salt Dome oil storage plan is now gaining public awareness as Coast residents slowly put Katrina’s concerns behind them. But the government’s actions during this period is not reflective of a responsible authority. By continuing to move forward on such a project in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, lends doubt to the credibility of the DOE’s actions, and even adds questions to those higher public officials who certainly are aware of what is going on. Additional Information: DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY Record of Decision and Floodplain Statement of Findings: Site Selection for the Expansion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/reserves/spr/ROD_FINAL_02-14-07.pdf Power Point Presentation Sierra Club Rallies Citizens to Speak Out Against Salt Dome Oil Storage Project - Mississippi Press More
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then pumping the water back to the Mississippi Sound south of Pascagoula
to be discharged near Horn Island, a national wildlife refuge and park.
The government plans to finish the huge project by 2019.
The DOE
had planned to hold a hearing in Hattiesburg Oct. 4, 2005 and in
Pascagoula on Oct. 5, 2005 at the LaFont Inn, but due to the hurricane’s
terrible aftermath, the department
