In July 2024, Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN) began larger replacement construction of its pipeline compressors in Starbuck, Walla Walla County, Washington, and Kent, Sherman County, Oregon, near Bend, for its GTN Xpress pipeline expansion moving increased methane volumes and pressures through its dangerously corroded (according to whistleblowing inspectors), 63-year pipeline across north Idaho, eastern Washington, and central Oregon.  During the same month, it started pumping one third of its expansion capacity, 50 million of 150 million cubic feet of additional gas per day.  GTN finished Kent compressor “auxiliary facilities” and obtained Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) permission to bring them online for existing GTN volumes on November 22.  On December 2, GTN requested FERC approval to start using the full capacity of the upgraded GTN Xpress pipeline on Wednesday, December 11.  FERC predictably granted entire GTN Xpress start-up on Thursday, December 12, as Starbuck compressor installation and site restoration neared completion.

Meanwhile, the fate of GTN Xpress remains unresolved by litigation in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in oil industry friendly Texas.  Among case opening briefs filed on October 28, GTN complains that its replacement facilities did not garner the usual FERC predetermination of “rolled-in rates” afforded similar projects.  These rates allow gas shippers to pass the costs of their expansions onto all regional utility customers, whether they receive the extra methane or not.  Stop GTN Xpress coalition member groups Columbia Riverkeeper and Rogue Climate assert that FERC violated federal laws by refusing to consider a “no action” alternative to GTN Xpress, by segmenting its administrative review, and by failing to disclose the safety risks of pipeline expansion.  And state attorneys general of Washington and Oregon argue that FERC excluded compressor upgrade expenses from GTN Xpress costs and relied on unexplained public benefits and GTN agreements with utilities to falsely predict future gas demand, causing consumers to bear pipeline expansion costs for several decades.

Despite GTN discovering pipeline anomalies in November, which reduced flows in north Idaho, GTN Xpress started pushing extra methane this week.  Fracked gas infrastructure expansions like GTN Xpress jeopardize the health, safety, and lands of not only concerned Northwest communities, but also the people and places around source gas wells and pipelines in western Canada.  All these facilities inflict public and environmental harms, pollute shared global air and water, worsen climate change, risk explosive ruptures and fires, and force energy users into decades of fossil fuels dependence.  Clean, renewable energy offers less expensive and hazardous options that create sustainable jobs and a healthier future.

In response to reckless GTN Xpress approval and start-up, Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) and appreciated allies Extinction Rebellion (XR) Palouse, Spokane Veterans for Peace Chapter 35, and visiting climate activists invite you to join in rejecting Northwest fossil fuels expansions, by participating in a week of protests at GTN’s parent company, TC Energy, the two gas utilities receiving GTN Xpress methane, and other locations in five inland Northwest cities along and beyond the pipeline route: Continue reading →

Regional, volunteer, climate activists collective Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT), Veterans for Peace Spokane Chapter 35, and allied organizations invite the inland Northwest and especially Idaho community to again respond with public, forceful concern to the climate-wrecking, federally enforced, fossil fuel industry threat of the Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN) Xpress fracked methane gas pipeline expansion.  In Boise, Moscow, and Sandpoint, Idaho, and Kennewick and Spokane, Washington, in mid-May, we propose another week of not only demonstrations, similar to two previous endeavors, but also local presentations offered to describe two-plus years of ongoing, Northwest resistance to GTN Xpress and to consider direct actions against impending construction of compressor stations [1-3].

So many destructive fossil fuels and highway expansion projects have received permits or concluded construction during this last year, such as the Highway 95 reroute on Paradise Ridge near Moscow, the Coastal GasLink pipeline through unceded, Wet’suwet’en, indigenous territory in British Columbia, the Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline expansion across western Canada, and now GTN Xpress.  Despite the annual, privileged polluter panaceas of Earth Day, this increasingly unbreathable, unlivable planet needs all “hands on deck” and “boots on the ground” to stop the climate hell imposed by our industrialized life ways.

Please join with us and learn about the growing campaign to prevent plans by TC Energy, GTN, Cascade Natural Gas, Intermountain Gas, and other utilities, to push unneeded methane through aging, unsafe, GTN infrastructure and connected pipelines across Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.  We gratefully welcome your participation, strategy ideas, and responses in-person and/or via phone, text, or email, as we coordinate these upcoming events and provide a slide show, banner, and T-shirts.  Organizers also ask that you print, post, and share this announcement and flyer and bring protest signs, friends, and family to these public gatherings and discussions.

Saturday, May 11, Moscow, Idaho

Protest & Outreach: 10 am to 1 pm Moscow Farmers Market, Friendship Square, 400 S. Main Street

Talk: 6 to 8 pm The Attic, 314 E. Second Street (rear stairs)

Monday, May 13, Boise, Idaho

Protest: 3 to 5 pm Intermountain Gas, 555 S. Cole Road

Talk: 6 to 8 pm Boise Downtown Public Library, William Hayes Memorial Auditorium (first floor), 715 S. Capitol Boulevard

Tuesday, May 14, Kennewick, Washington

Protest: 3 to 5 pm Cascade Natural Gas, 8113 W. Grandridge Boulevard

Talk: 6 to 8 pm Mid-Columbia Library, conference room (first door on right), 1620 S. Union Street

Thursday, May 16, Spokane, Washington

Protest: 3 to 5 pm TC Energy, 201 W. North River Drive, Suite 505

Talk: 6 to 8 pm Liberty Park United Methodist Church, social hall, 1526 E. 11th Avenue

Friday, May 17, Sandpoint, Idaho

Talk: 3 to 5 pm East Bonner County Library, Community Room B, 1407 Cedar Street

Saturday, May 18, Sandpoint, Idaho

Protest & Outreach: 9 am to 1 pm Farmers’ Market at Sandpoint, Farmin Park, 301 Oak Street

Issue Updates

On the morning of April 16, 2024, Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN), a subsidiary of Keystone and Keystone XL tar sands pipelines owner TC Energy (formerly TransCanada), filed a request with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), for a prompt decision allowing construction to proceed at three Northwest compressor stations, to increase the gas capacity of the GTN Xpress fracked methane pipeline, FERC docket CP22-2 [4].  Also on April 16, in another probably industry-ghostwritten comment to FERC, Idaho Congressional members urged the commission to approve construction of this Canadian fossil fuels invasion “bringing more supply to the communities that the pipeline safely serves” [5]. Continue reading →

On October 19, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved the Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN) Xpress expansion of an unsafe, potentially explosive, six-decade-plus, methane (“natural” gas) pipeline across Idaho, Washington, and Oregon to California [1-7].  The Calgary, Alberta-based, Canadian owner of the rejected Keystone XL and rupture-prone Keystone tar sands pipelines in the Great Plains and the fiery Columbia Gas Transmission line in the northeast U.S., TC Energy (formerly TransCanada) proposes to increase the pump pressures of three compressor stations in Athol, Idaho, Starbuck, Washington, and Kent, Oregon, and push an additional 150 million cubic feet per day of unneeded, fracked gas volumes through the almost 1,400-mile-long GTN line from Eastport, Idaho, to Malin, Oregon, suspiciously the origin point of the defeated Pacific Connector gas pipeline to the also vanquished Jordan Cove liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal planned for Coos Bay, Oregon [8, 9].

The bi-directional Williams Northwest gas line would carry over half (79 million cubic feet per day) of GTN Xpress methane from the GTN-Northwest juncture near the Columbia River at Stanfield, Oregon, to the Boise metropolitan area and southern Idaho.  Cascade Natural Gas based in Kennewick, Washington, and Intermountain Gas headquartered in Boise signed precedent agreements for their utility companies to receive and distribute GTN Xpress gas.  Not coincidentally, Intermountain has concurrently applied to the Idaho Public Utilities Commission for customer rate increases, contested by the city of Boise and Idaho Conservation League, likely to pass the costs of excess GTN methane on to Idaho consumers.

After rubber stamping 423 of 425 pipeline applications as standard practice during the last two decades, FERC published a 79-page order issuing a certificate of public convenience and necessity for GTN Xpress, including statements from commissioners Clements and Danly both partially concurring and dissenting with the decision [10, 11].  This outcome ignored Northwest concerns about the lack of gas demand and the climate, health, and safety impacts of the expansion (addressed in an upcoming action alert), neglected proper tribal consultation, despite extensive comments to FERC from the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, and dismissed unprecedented community, tribal, and state and federal government resistance to this scheme clearly driven by industry profits from increasingly stranded fossil fuels assets.

Columbia Riverkeeper and Rogue Climate, accepted intervenors in this quasi-judicial, FERC case deliberating whether GTN Xpress methane is both necessary and in the public interest, will challenge this reckless decision, by petitioning FERC before November 22, to withdraw its GTN Xpress order and/or hold a formal rehearing.  Through their first of several filings, since the public comment period on the draft environmental impact statement (EIS) for GTN Xpress in summer 2022, all three West Coast attorneys general requested belated intervenor status after the February 2022 deadline.  The Stop GTN Xpress coalition is encouraging the states of Washington, Oregon, and California, who urged FERC to reject this project, to also ask FERC for a rehearing.  As the Northwest continues to hold FERC, TC Energy, and GTN accountable for exacerbated climate change and environmental injustices, FERC can grant, deny, or ignore these petitions within 30 days of their filing, and compressor station upgrades and construction could begin in January 2024.

Besides thousands of Northwest citizens and a broad coalition of dozens of regional and nationwide, indigenous, environmental, health, and faith advocacy groups, numerous elected officials have voiced objections to GTN Xpress, including U.S. senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden of Oregon, Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray of Washington, and Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla of California, U.S. Congressional members Earl Blumenauer and Andrea Salinas of Oregon, Washington governor Jay Inslee, Oregon governor Tina Kotek, attorneys general Rob Bonta of California, Bob Ferguson of Washington, and Ellen Rosenblum of Oregon, and four Oregon and Washington state representatives.

Inland Northwest GTN Xpress Weeks of Actions Continue reading →

Along with Inland Northwest GTN Xpress Weeks of Actions in Athol, Boise, Moscow, and Sandpoint, Idaho, and Kennewick and Spokane, Washington, on October 28 to November 10, Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) activists and allies encourage you to attend this GTN Xpress pipeline corridor community safety vigil on Sunday evening, November 5 [1, 2].

Forwarded message:

Dear colleagues and friends,

You are invited to a vigil to respond to the recent, disappointing news that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has green-lighted the GTN Xpress fracked gas pipeline expansion project.  Here are the details, and attached is a flyer, which you are welcome to pass along to those who would be interested.

Vigil for Community Safety Against Approved Pipeline Expansion of Gas Transmission Northwest Xpress

Sunday, November 5, 2023, 4:30-5:30 pm*

St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, 316 East 24th Avenue, Spokane

*Please note that this will be an outdoor event on the day when clocks change from daylight savings to standard time.  For more information, please see our website, the Seattle Times, and Columbia Riverkeeper [3-5].

The vigil is co-sponsored by these organizations: Continue reading →

WHAT THE FERC?!

On Thursday, July 20, a Northwest coalition of groups working to stop the Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN) Xpress pipeline expansion learned that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) listed GTN Xpress on its certificate agenda for its monthly meeting on Thursday, July 27.  In an apparent, massive, rubberstamp attempt to rush approvals before FERC’s August non-meeting break, the federal agency will likely permit a slew of fossil fuels projects including the GTN Xpress application of TC Energy, owner of the rupturing Keystone and rejected Keystone XL tar sands pipelines.  Along with thousands of Northwest citizens and dozens of organizations, the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and West Coast governors, state attorneys general and legislators, and U.S. senators have opposed and organized against GTN Xpress for almost two years.

GTN Xpress is essentially a fossil fuels invasion of southern Idaho, thankfully challenged by neighboring states and Sandpoint and Spokane fossil fuels sacrifice zones that would receive only 13 percent or none of additional GTN gas.  More than half of the 150 million cubic feet per day of extra, unnecessary, fracked gas that TC Energy plans to push with three upgraded compressors through the 60-year-plus GTN pipeline would threaten the health and safety of north Idaho and eastern Washington pipeline corridor residents, for delivery to southern Idaho.  GTN and Intermountain Gas of Boise, who requested gas customer price hikes last winter, intend to essentially take over and reverse westward Williams Northwest pipeline flows, to bolster their profits at the 30-year expense of utility ratepayers increasingly favoring alternative energy.

WIRT is exploring the GTN Xpress record for information about probably missing Williams agreements and to produce second WIRT comments before July 27, welcoming other, also issue-underrepresented, Idaho and inland Northwest groups and residents to send your remarks to FERC.  Despite postponed railroad double-track construction impeding public transportation and requiring citizen monitoring at the Sandpoint Amtrak station, we will next coordinate regional protests in Athol (site of one of three compressor expansions), Sandpoint, Spokane, Moscow, and Boise, denouncing GTN’s proposal and FERC’s predictable decision, while supporting FERC re-hearing petitions filed by coalition partners and hopefully Northwest states, before the August 26 challenge deadline.  We appreciate your interest in GTN Xpress resistance and your input toward comments and demonstrations that demand FERC justice from the ongoing dangers and compounded risks of GTN Xpress expansion, leaks, and resulting climate disasters.

ANOTHER TC ENERGY PIPELINE RUPTURE

On July 25, the TC Energy-owned Columbia Gas Transmission pipeline catastrophically failed, causing a large explosion and fire and temporarily closing Interstate 81 in rural Shenandoah County, Virginia, approximately 80 miles west of Washington, D.C. [1, 2].  Thankfully, the incident neither injured nor killed anyone, and its causes and impacts remain unknown.  But like the December 2022 rupture and 600,000-gallon spill from TC Energy’s Keystone tar sands pipeline into a Kansas stream only weeks after FERC release of the GTN Xpress final environmental impact statement (EIS), the Virginia disaster demonstrates the terrible safety record of TC Energy and timely illustrates the major risks posed by TC Energy’s GTN Xpress, less than 48 hours before FERC could approve this expansion scheme [3].  The proposal would increase flammable, climate-wrecking, methane gas flows through a six-decade-old pipeline among fire-prone rural lands and urban residential areas in Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.  As multiple wildfires burn and blanket the Northwest with smoke, a pipeline accident like the one that just occurred in Shenandoah County could devastate nearby communities. Continue reading →

On Wednesday evening, April 12, in Spokane, Washington, faith, spiritual, health, and environmental advocates will lead a community gathering, teach-in, and procession in opposition to the proposed Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN) Xpress fracked gas pipeline expansion [1].  The 62-year-old GTN pipeline runs under the Spokane River and through Liberty Lake, Spokane Valley, and other parts of Spokane County [2, 3].  Canadian company TC Energy, owner of the leaking Keystone and rejected Keystone XL tar sands pipelines, and its subsidiary GTN threaten to pump up to 150 million cubic feet of additional methane gas per day through the GTN pipeline that crosses north Idaho, eastern Washington, and central Oregon.

While communities throughout the Northwest shift away from coal, oil, and “natural” gas, fossil fuel companies like TC Energy have adopted a new tactic: bolstering the capacity of aging pipelines.  A broad, regional, Stop GTN Xpress coalition, the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, U.S. Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden of Oregon, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, three West Coast state attorneys general, and other concerned Northwesterners are resisting this gas pipeline and compressor station expansion.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) could vote for or against granting project approval as early as April 20.  The GTN Xpress pipeline expansion further risks exposing local, Spokane area, and north Idaho communities to both the dangers and damages of ruptured pipeline explosions, fires, and pollution and the increased carbon and greenhouse gas emissions that are causing more severe storms, droughts, wildfires, and floods [4-6].

The gathering and teach-in at 6:30 pm Pacific time on April 12, at Salem Lutheran Church, 1428 West Broadway Avenue in Spokane, will feature comments from members of Earth Ministry/Washington Interfaith Power and Light (WAIPL), Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility (WPSR), and Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT), among other organizations [7-9].  They will offer opportunities to learn about GTN Xpress and its potential impacts on public and environmental health and safety.  After an interactive presentation with speakers, event organizers invite participants to join a procession with signs and banners, walking together several blocks to the banks of the Spokane River, where faith leaders will share a brief group prayer and photograph the demonstration.

To access further information and attend, please contact coordinating groups and visit their websites and RSVP through the event description link [10]. Continue reading →