—Submitted by the Friends of the San Juans

If all the new and expanding terminal and refinery projects in the Salish Sea are permitted and developed, including projects that became operational in 2014, there would be a 43 percent increase in large, commercial marine vessel traffic.

Friends of the San Juans and San Juan Islanders for Safe Shipping have released the Salish Sea Vessel Traffic Projections featuring 18 new or expanded proposed or recently completed projects, which cumulatively would add an additional 5,300 annual vessel transits to and from ports in the area.

Friends of the San Juans partnered with San Juan Islanders for Safe Shipping to research and create the Salish Sea Vessel Traffic Projections flyer given the lack of current consolidated vessel traffic projections for British Columbia and Washington.

Container ship traffic is projected to increase by a total of 1,300 transits per year. There are two new container terminal proposals and one container terminal expansion underway in Port Metro Vancouver. The ports of Seattle and Tacoma recently formed the Northwest Seaport Alliance with plans to increase their container terminals’ capacity from 3,400,000 TEUs 20-foot Equivalent Units) to 6,000,000 TEUs per year.

The project that represents the greatest oil spill risk is Kinder Morgan’s proposed Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion project, which would increase Canadian oil sands crude oil exports from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels per day.

This project’s oil spill risk is compounded by the amount of increased vessel traffic and the volume and type of crude oil cargo, which is more environmentally damaging and more costly to clean up in the event of a spill. Project-related tanker vessel traffic would increase from 120 transits per year to 816 oil tanker transits per year.

The Salish Sea Vessel Traffic Projections flyer can be found here.