Submit a Public Comment on Kalama’s Methanol Refinery

Fight Fracked Gas! Protect the Climate!

The world’s largest fracked gas-to-methanol refinery threatens the Columbia River and the community of Kalama, Washington just 30 miles north of Portland. The facility would lock the Pacific Northwest into decades of using dirty fracked gas at a time when we need to transition to clean energy.

The good news: You can protect our climate and the Columbia. A critical public comment period is open now on the supplemental environmental review of the Kalama fracked gas-to-methanol refinery.

The 241 page Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (DSEIS) can be found here, or see below for the main talking points we've identified.

Talking Points

• Unbelievably, the DSEIS concludes that the fracked gas to methanol refinery would result in a net climate benefit, stating that the facility in Kalama will replace coal-based methanol production in China. To reach this conclusion the report relies on a series of questionable assumptions about global methanol markets, energy commodity prices, Chinese government policy, and U.S-China trade relations.
• The DSEIS underestimates the amount of methane (AKA natural gas) that would be associated with the Kalama facility due to increased fracking and relies on outdated metrics that underestimate the climate-disrupting impact of methane.
• The DSEIS ignores or downplays multiple comprehensive studies finding a significantly higher methane-leakage rate than the report relies on and, in turn, underestimates the climate impacts of extracting and transporting the gas that will be processed at the facility.
• The report primarily assumes that gas will be purchased from British Columbia rather than the U.S. for the lifetime of the project, and fails to properly evaluate the climate impacts of fracking if the company relies on fracked gas from the U.S. rather than Canada in the future.
• The DSEIS does not properly account for the greenhouse gas impacts of methanol as a fuel source, a probable use of the methanol produced in Kalama.

Subject:
Public Comment on Kalama Methanol Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement

To:
Dear Governor Inslee
CC: Port of Kalama and Washington Department of Ecology,