In December, 2023, a D.C. district appeals court overturned the Federal Surface Transportation Board’s 2021 approval of the Uinta Basin Railway. The 88-mile short line would connect the oil-rich Uinta Basin to the national rail line, enabling the shipment of crude oil to Gulf Coast refineries.
The ruling said, in part, that the Surface Transportation Board failed to consider local effects of increased oil drilling in the Uinta Basin, plus the downline cumulative impacts of hauling crude by rail from Utah to the Gulf Coast and refining it in communities already hard-hit by chemical pollution .
Ted Zukoski, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said, “The board itself said it was reasonably foreseeable that 90% of this oil was going to go to Houston or Cancer Alley or Port Arthur, Texas. They made their estimate of where this is going to go and how much of it's going to go there,” he explained.
“And then they didn't look at the impacts of that, which is going to be more oil processed in refineries, which means more air pollution.”
Railway proponents argue that the analysis should focus solely on the Surface Transportation Board's jurisdiction—the 88-mile railway in Utah.
Zukoski said this raises all kinds of troubling questions. “What does the railway regulate? They don't regulate wildlife. They don't regulate noise. Do they have to worry about that?” he said.
It is now up to the U.S. Supreme Court to determine the limits of the environmental review. Zukoski said the case could be heard as soon as December.
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