Washington (Platts)--29Nov2012/506 pm EST/2206 GMT
The US Army Corps of Engineers has agreed to speed up the removal of underwater rocks threatening navigation on the drought-lowered Mississippi River, a spokeswoman for US Senator Dick Durbin said Thursday. Durbin (Democrat-Illinois) met with a top Corps official Thursday to urge action to prevent low water conditions from halting shipping on the Mississippi River between St. Louis and Cairo, Illinois. The meeting came after pressure from the US barge industry, which has warned for two weeks that reduced flows from the Missouri River combined with underwater rocks crowding the Mississippi riverbed south of St. Louis could make the crucial waterway too shallow for vessels to safely travel. Durbin spokeswoman Christina Mulka did not give details of how Jo-Ellen Darcy, the Corps' assistant secretary for civil works, promised to accelerate the rock demolition. Corps spokeswoman Sue Casseau, who did not attend the meeting, said the actual removal might take four to 14 days depending on river conditions, but the overall process of securing Congress' permission and funding, then nailing down a contract, could push the project into March or April. "We have been directed to put together a plan about how we would like to do it," she said. "We have done that. We have several options but the actual timing for making it happen actually starts with directions from Congress to do it." Casseau said removing some of the rocks would cost an estimated $10 million. Two groups of several-mile-long rock outcroppings are located near the Illinois towns of Thebes and Grand Tower. They look like underwater mountain ridges jutting from the riverbed. Mulka said the Corps reiterated its position that it cannot release water from the Missouri River to help raise the Mississippi. The agency decides every fall how much water to impound above the Gavins Point Dam in South Dakota, after balancing the needs of eight river uses on the upper Missouri River, including irrigation, navigation, hydropower and recreation. The Corps plans to reduce the Missouri flows to 12,000 cubic feet per second by December 11 and hold them at that lower rate through February. Barges carry crude oil, petroleum products, coal, grains and other commodities on the Mississippi year-round. A coalition of groups representing barge owners said the low water conditions threaten to halt the shipment of 1.3 million tons of petroleum products and 700,000 tons of crude oil in December and January. The American Waterways Operators used a rate of 7 to 8 barrels per ton to convert those figures to up to 10.4 million barrels of refined products and up to 5.6 million barrels of crude. "That would be assuming that either no traffic is moving or that there are severe disruptions," spokeswoman Ann McCulloch said. "It's a worst-case scenario, but to tell you the truth, those are the impacts we're bracing for." McCulloch said the oil would likely be light sweet crude including WTI, supplies trapped at Cushing or Bakken oil moving south after being shipped by rail to the river. The group came up with the estimates by surveying member companies and looking at 2010 waterborne commerce statistics, McCulloch said.--Meghan Gordon, meghan_gordon@platts.com--Edited by Kevin Saville, kevin_saville@platts.com