The New York Times reports that  company that proposed building a coal-export plant on the Columbia River in Longview lied to state officials about the size of its planned coal-shipping facility. Ultimately, the company planned to build a shipping plant as much as 12 times larger than the one it described to the state.

Court records show that leaders of the company planning to build the facility, now called Millennium Bulk Terminals, tried to limit what state officials knew about its long-term goals during the early permitting process last year. The company’s initial application described a facility that could export up to five million tons of coal per year. But court records show that the company hoped to greatly expand that amount in a second phase to 20 million tons or even 60 million tons annually. [...]

Even as he urged the company, a spinoff of Ambre Energy of Australia, to use “ongoing transparency” with the state, Mr. Torkington wrote that Millennium should deliberately wait at least two months before proposing an expansion. Otherwise, he wrote, “Millennium will be perceived as having deceived the agencies” and the company’s “good reputation would be lost overnight.” [...]

“I love the part that says Millennium ‘will be perceived as having deceived,’ ” said Gayle Kiser, a resident of Cowlitz County and a volunteer for Columbia Riverkeeper, an environmental group opposing the project. “They knew darn well what they were about in keeping this quiet.”

The coal-shipping project has been controversial since its inception, with environmentalists arguing that it would represent a complete reversal of Washington State's policy of reducing its reliance on coal and reducing its carbon emissions. As Eric de Place at Sightline notes, 60 million tons of coal "is the carbon equivalent of all the gasoline burned yearly in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, and the northern half of California combined."