Energy corridors may cut a swath through wild areas
The McNary Wildlife Refuge is a system of sloughs and mudflats near where the Columbia and Snake rivers meet in southeastern Washington. It's home to bald eagles, endangered peregrine falcons and thousands of migrating shorebirds.
Someday, it also may be next door to a new string of electricity towers or underground pipelines delivering more energy to the West.
Next month, the federal government will unveil a proposal to dedicate thousands of miles of federal land in the West as a network of utility corridors, where energy companies in the future could locate new transmission towers or pipelines for oil, gas and hydrogen.
Most will be in places already home to gas lines or electricity lines.
But some may be three-quarters of a mile wide, cutting across undisturbed terrain or through national parks, scenic areas or wildlife-rich lands. An early draft suggests one might run alongside the McNary refuge.
Some government officials, environmentalists and tribal leaders fear the proposal could ultimately disrupt sensitive landscapes and expose some of the West's most distinctive places to pipeline explosions or fuel spills.
"Alarm bells are ringing on some of these corridors," said Ivan Maluski, conservation coordinator for the Sierra Club in Oregon.
Frustrated by the lengthy process the energy industry faces when it wants to run pipes and power lines, Congress last year gave the Department of Energy and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) until August 2007 to set aside energy corridors on federal land in 11 Western states.
The idea was to consolidate the permitting for using federal land and speed up efforts to improve power delivery. Establishing a corridor is similar to zoning; construction will still go through additional environmental review, said Scott Powers, who heads up the project for the BLM. In some places, construction may be decades away, or never occur at all.
The agencies have held public meetings and issued several reports. But they have declined to release working maps of the proposals until next month.
A map obtained by The Seattle Times appears to suggest that most major corridors in Washington would run along existing highways, such as Highway 2 across Stevens Pass, near where utility lines already cross the Cascades. Another corridor may run near an existing pipeline that borders the McNary refuge.
But it's not clear how much wider those corridors could become, and based on that map, it appears one would run through critical spotted-owl habitat in Oregon's Mount Hood National Forest.
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Energy corridors may cut a swath through wild areas
