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Port developer attacks Oakland coal ban and city’s claims that Utah shipments would endanger public health

The city of Oakland’s health study that led it to ban coal shipments through a proposed port terminal on the San Francisco Bay has come under severe attack in a California courtroom.

Expert testimony this week in a lawsuit brought by port developers who are seeking to ship million of tons of Utah coal through a proposed deep-water terminal in Oakland painted the city’s health analysis as lacking scientific rigor and mired in errors.

To help justify excluding coal, for example, the Bay Area city relied heavily on dust-emission studies that examined rail transport of sub-bituminous coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana — not the chunky, bituminous kind of coal that is extracted from Utah’s mines.