Savage terminals in Price, Salt Lake City UT to begin handling 'crude by rail’

Savage announced April 29 that it is expanding service offerings at its terminals located in Price UT and Salt Lake City UT to include crude-by-rail transloading services, and associated car storage, on a manifest basis. These terminals will provide Uintah Basin crude, bound for key refinery markets, access to rail transportation.

The Savage terminal in Price is the first facility in the area to offer crude-by-rail origination services on the Union Pacific Railroad. Together with the Savage Bingham & Garfield in Salt Lake City, these terminals will have the capacity to transload 9,000 barrels per day. Bulk Transporter

Utah business makes energy bars from crickets

Pat Crowley wants to attract Americans to what most of the world’s population already knows: Edible insects are a rich source of protein that’s easy on the Earth.

Crickets ground into flour — that way there are no legs or antennae to think about — provide the protein in the energy bars Crowley and his three partners started making last September.

The business is small but growing steadily, with 2,000 bars sold last month. The Chapul Bars — it means cricket or grasshopper in Aztec — are sold for about $3 in 30 locally-owned stores in 12 states, and Crowley expects to double the retail locations in the next month. He also is about to double the number of energy bar flavors — bringing it to four — and will soon be moving to a larger kitchen.

"People are ready for a change," Crowley said. "They’re more in tune with where their food comes from and the unsustainability of our mainstream food products."

Some 80 percent of the world’s population intentionally eats 1,700 species of insects for food. People eat red tree ants in Cambodia, bee larvae in Japan and grasshoppers in Mexico, Crowley said.
Americans and Europeans are notably absent from the guest list.

As Crowley mixes up a batch of his Thai flavored bars — cricket flour stirred with coconut flakes, dates, almond butter, agave nectar, cashews, ginger and lime — he says the flavors are inspired by cultures where insects are traditionally consumed as part of their diets.


Utah has its own cultural tradition of eating insects. Like about 50 percent of Native American tribes that used insects as food, the Utes and Southern Paiutes did, too. In the 1870s, John Wesley Powell noted that grasshoppers and crickets were collected in droves, roasted like seeds and ground down to be eaten as a mush or in cakes.

They were eaten whole, salted and sun-dried, "much as residents of any present-day neighborhood lounge consume beer nuts," David B. Madsen, Utah’s former state archeologist, wrote in his article "A Grasshopper in Every Pot" published in a Nevada historical quarterly in 1989. Madsen has also written that Mormon pioneer diaries were full of references to eating insects.

Not only were insects widely used as Native Americans’ winter food storage, they also were a delicacy. The mixture of insects, pine nuts and berries left to dry in the sun was called "desert fruitcake."

Chapul bars can currently be found in many locations in the Salt Lake City area as well as OARS in Vernal. Salt Lake Tribune

Tanker trucks on highways

Give state officials an A for being frank. They don’t know what to do about vastly increased tanker truck traffic that will barrel down U.S. 40 when the volume of crude oil heading from the Uintah Basin to Salt Lake Valley refineries doubles next year. We don’t know what to do, either. But like state transportation officials and legislators, we know a problem when we see one.

A study is under way to consider options. The trouble is that those options are unlikely to be available before the truck traffic swells.

If you live in Heber City, where U.S. 40 doubles as Main Street, that’s not good news. That could mean one or two of the heavy trucks passing every minute.

Daniels Canyon above Heber City is steep and can be treacherous during winter weather. The same is true of I-80 through Parleys Canyon before the roadway passes into Salt Lake City. U.S. 40 passes Strawberry Reservoir above Daniels Canyon, and I-80 abuts Mountain Dell Reservoir in Parleys. An oil spill into either of those waters could be an environmental mess.

I-80 is the transportation aorta for Salt Lake City from the east. Adding more heavy truck traffic to that already congested roadway will inevitably add to safety risks.

Those are the negatives. There also are positives. It’s good that Salt Lake City refineries will be processing more crude oil from Utah to produce gasoline and other petroleum products. Energy independence is important to the nation and to Utah’s economy. It’s better to have the oil come from Utah than from somewhere more distant. Salt Lake Tribune

Opponents of refinery expansion focus on health concerns

Opponents of a proposed expansion at the Tesoro Refinery voiced their concerns to the state Division of Air Quality Tuesday. The project would expand two refineries at the border of Salt Lake City and southern Davis County to increase processing capability for black and yellow wax crude oil. The Uintah Basin contains large deposits of these wax crudes, and a new oil pipeline allows area refineries to transport more petroleum to Cedar City and Las Vegas.

A document made available by the Division of Air Quality said the expansion would "result in increased jobs and royalty payments to the state" and "ensure a long-term market for Utah crude, supporting job growth and providing significant tax revenues to the state."


Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, criticized the Division of Air Quality's emphasis on economic benefits, and compared it to supporting selling cigarettes door-to-door as a means of job creation.

Dan Riley, vice president of government affairs for Tesoro, said the project would help Utah and wouldn't have the environmental impact some said it would. "This is a great project for Tesoro, for Salt Lake, and for the state," he said. "As opposed to going out of state, we'll be able to process local crude."

Riley said Tesoro plans to reduce emissions with the project. A gas cleanup unit that would be built would remove additional sulfur dioxide, lowering it by 66 tons, he said. Although Tesoro expects sulfur dioxide emissions to decrease as a result of the expansion, the Division of Air Quality reported that there would be an increase in actual emissions. However the actual emissions will not exceed the maximum allowable emissions assigned to the refinery, the district reported. Deseret News

Utah home sales up for 8th straight month, report states

Utah home sales climbed for the eighth consecutive month in January, up more than 6 percent from a year ago, according to a new report from the Utah Association of Realtors. UAR reported that 120 more homes sold this year than in January 2011, closing 1,985 transactions — the highest total in five years. Activity was especially strong in Salt Lake, Uintah and Davis counties, where sales were up 30 percent, 29 percent and 6 percent, respectively. Deseret News

Feds help pay for Utah’s flood damage

Utah will receive federal aid to pay for this spring’s flood damage. President Barack Obama signed a Utah disaster declaration and ordered federal funds to supplement the recovery effort from flooding between April 18 and July 16.

The funds are available to state, tribal and eligible local governments, and certain private nonprofit organizations, on a cost-sharing basis for emergency work and repair or replacement of facilities damaged by the flooding in the counties of Beaver, Box Elder, Cache, Daggett, Duchesne, Emery, Millard, Morgan, Piute, Salt Lake, Sanpete, Sevier, Summit, Tooele, Uintah, Utah, Wasatch and Weber, and the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation. The state could be eligible for $9.5 million in federal aid. Salt Lake Tribune

Native American job training gets $524,000

The U.S. Labor Department awarded on Tuesday more than a half-million dollars in grants for job training and placement programs for Native Americans in Utah.

That included $174,558 to the Ute Tribe, and $349,375 to the Indian Training & Education Center in West Valley City.

Most of the money is to provide employment and training services for Native Americans ages 14 and up who are unemployed, underemployed or are low-income individuals. Some money also is set aside specifically to help young people ages 14 to 21 find summer or permanent work. The Deseret News