The Waterways Journal

The Sierra Club announces an all-out campaign to kill natural gas drilling.

An exhaustive—and blind—EPA-sponsored study of fracking concludes that there is no demonstrated link between between fracking and groundwater contamination.

Politifact fact-checks Rep. Bob Gibb’s statements on the inland waterways.

“Gibbs said that water transportation is the cheapest, safest, cleanest and most fuel efficient way to move cargo. Clearly, it’s the most fuel efficient on average. It’s also safer and cleaner.

As for the expense, because barge traffic is so dependent on rail and trucking, those two modes of transportation could have an impact. But that said, the experts we talked to were persuasive that on average, water transportation is least expensive.

On the Truth-O-Meter, Gibbs’ statement rates True.”

Asian carp on the Illinois River as a business opportunity.

In the WSJ today, a Japanese firm wants to invest up to a billion dollars in a planned U.S. LNG export facility in Louisiana.

Equity funds are also interested: “Earlier this month, Houston-based Cheniere agreed to sell $1.5 billion worth of stock to investors affiliated with Blackstone Group LP and said proceeds would help fund the terminal. A week earlier, Cheniere said it would sell $468 million worth of stock to Temasek Holdings, a Singapore investment company, and U.S. private-equity investor RRJ Capital to help fund the project, expected to cost $4.5 billion to $5 billion in its initial phase.”

A new economic impact study sponsored by the Louisiana Ports Association shows (among other things) that more than 396,000 jobs in the state depend on ports. Watch our upcoming issue for a story on this.

Here’s where some of the money not being spent on our crumbling dams, locks, and harbors is going.

While America’s waterways infrastructure crumbles, other countries, such as Colombia, are not standing still.

“Recently, the Colombian government released details of its plan to invest more than US$7.5 billion to restore and expand the country’s rail system and improve the Magdalena River. Its objective is to strengthen these two main transportation routes to reduce long distances between the production and consumption centers and the sea ports, thereby increasing exports.

According to the Colombian Chamber of Infrastructure, the current lack of multimodal transportation adds an estimated 80% to the cost of transporting coal. … For the Magdalena River, Colombia and local municipalities plan to invest more than US$135 million over four years in order to restore navigability to 1,500 km of the river. This is expected to increase transportation capacity from 35 million tons annually to 90 million by 2018.”

Winona (Minn.)’s one-year moratorium on expanding frack sand facilities conceals an unexplained conflict of interest.

Capt. John Cota, who spent 10 months in prison for causing the worst oil spill in San Francisco Bay in two decades when he crashed the cargo ship Cosco Busan into the Bay Bridge in 2007, is quietly trying to regain his mariner’s license.