Will County Board OKs barge terminal for oil near Lockport’s 9th Street bridge

By Michelle Mullins

Daily Southtown

Jul 20, 2023 at 2:19 pm

The Will County Board approved plans this week for an oil pipeline and barge terminal to be built on a strip of land between the Des Plaines River and the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal in unincorporated Will County near Romeoville and Lockport.

Ducere LLC plans to build and operate a terminal that would take oil from pipelines that originated in North Dakota and Canada and place it on barges to be transported to regional refineries and beyond. There will be connections to nearby petroleum pipelines and the proposed facility would transfer petroleum products from pipelines to barges.

The loading terminal would be located along the main channel of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, near the 9th Street bridge in Lockport.

A similar plan was approved by the Will County Board in 2015, but there were delays in the permit process, and the special use permit and variance has since expired, county officials said.

Ducere has worked for several years to obtain all required permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency’s bureaus of water and air, county officials said.

Opponents of the project questioned its environmental impact to nearby homes. They voiced concerns about what would happen to their drinking water supply in the event of an oil spill.

“Five of the 10 largest oil spills in history have been as a result of boats,” said board member Destinee Ortiz, a Democrat from Romeoville, who was one of four board members to vote against the project. “When I ran for office, I vowed to the people in my district to fight for clean water, clean air and a sustainable future our children would be proud of inheriting.”

Jennifer Garlitz, a Joliet resident, said she didn’t feel this project would benefit Will County residents.

“With oil leakage, there’s risk to underground aquifers, which is our water supply, risk to rivers, risk to well water,” she said. “We’re risking our beautiful natural areas with no benefit to us.”

Garlitz said clean renewable energy is needed to fight climate change, and renewable energy is the future for job growth.

“We are living in climate change right now,” she said. “We’re just going to get more wildfire smoke, more severe storms, more flooding, more droughts.”

Dave Nelson, Ducere president and CEO, said barge transportation is safer than moving oil by train and the project would “dramatically reduce rail traffic.”

He said the Midwest benefits from accessing oil from Canada rather than oil from the Middle East.