In March Carbon County Commissioner Jae Potter stated that Castle Country is a wonderful place and has been built on the backs of coal, that is still the case after a 7-0 vote at a Oakland City Council meeting on Monday, June 27 in favor of banning the storage and handling of coal and petroleum at the former Oakland Army Base.
The $53 million port project which runs under a mile of the population of Oakland City limits has been a four county effort between Carbon, Emery, Sevier and Sanpete. “The thing that I would like to communicate to our community that this is a good thing that we continue to work on. The coal industry can be and needs to be very vital into the future as far as our baseload power and what we are seeing in California is again environmentalism and sensationalism at its very worst in my opinion,” stated Potter. Modern life cannot be made without coal, fossil fuels and carbon products, that in itself is a contradiction and is why there are so many activists.
At this point it’s a waiting game for the port project, but this could be or will still be a great opportunity for rural Utah to export internationally. Potter added, “We are going to have to wait and see, and as we talked before we have been working on looking at what contracts would look like and we’ll continue to work on that and see what steps the developers take next and terminal operators as far as whether that’s a litigation with the City of Oakland or where that stands. We’ve not invested any of those $53 million at this point, those are all just in reserves for this project. Obviously we’re not going to go forward into a project that is not fully vetted and has the full opportunity to export our products through it.”
The Oakland City Council will hold a second meeting on July 9 and Potter hopes that the second reading of measures will provide new additional information about the project. “The information that we continue to send out contrary to what is put out by environmental community is the advantages of coal and where coal technology is going and the estimated increase and demand both in the United States and worldwide. They can say what they want and California is going to do what California does which I hope we never follow but I think we have to press forward, know that this is an abundant great resource that we have and look for those opportunities to continue mining coal, using it for power and other needs, also that increase throughout the world. We will continue to look for opportunities that we can partner into export,” stated Potter. The entire port project could be beneficial to Oakland if looked at as a gain instead of what is being turned away.
A better understanding of the process of coal and a little bit of truth in energy is what is needed as Potter further describes, “The other thing that I can continue to do is to invite those people, the Oakland City Council and others to come see how coal is handled and the false claims that are being made there. If they would come out and see what we do they would better understand because right now it’s all hyperbole, it’s all what’s put out there, there is never any of the other. So I really think they ought to come take a look at what our mining operations do.”
Potter finished by strongly encouraging the community to not see this as a “blick situation” – other opportunities are being looked at to boost our economy. The $53 billion has not been invested so nothing has been lost at this time. The monies were designated for ports, rails and pipelines, which could be used for other opportunities if an agreement is not met for the port project in Oakland.