Economic and Environmental Impacts of the Columbia-Snake River Extended Lock Outage

This report’s main objective is to analyze the change in rates and modal costs for shippers, commodity industries and ports prior to, during and after the fifteen week lock outage and to determine the impacts on the environment in the form of energy consumption and emissions production prior to, during and after the lock outage. Waterborne movements are one of the more economical and cost-efficient methods of transport among all modes of transportation, comprising a key component of the Pacific Northwest multimodal transportation system. Commodity shipments moving through this river system were recently halted for 15 weeks during the winter of 2010-2011 for an unprecedented extended lock outage. The specific research objectives and methodology for the entire study as well as economic and environmental impacts are reviewed in Section 1. Section 2 summarizes the four phases of the study and includes data and sections from those commentaries. Additional tables are available in Appendix A. Section 3 reviews the economic costs of the lock outage for major commodity industries, shippers and ports. Section 4 discusses the environmental impacts of the lock outage. This section begins with a review of literature of energy intensity coefficients and emissions coefficients for various transportation modes. Then energy used via different modes prior to and during the lock outage are calculated and discussed. The same is done for emissions produced during these time periods. Section 5 provides a summary of the entire study and describes the value of the river.