2024 August Economic Report

The Chehalis River Basin Flood Control Zone District has released new information about the proposed flow-through dam for flood control on the Chehalis River near Pe Ell, an innovative flood risk solution that reduces flood damage to downstream communities during major storm events while minimally affecting the river’s natural flows under normal conditions.

This approach to flood damage reduction has been highlighted by the United Nations Climate Technology Centre and Network as an important adaptation technology.

The Chehalis River Basin Flood Control District is a special purpose district based in Chehalis and is the project applicant for the Chehalis River Flood Damage Reduction Project that is currently undergoing environmental review by state and federal agencies. In 2020, the Washington State Department of Ecology and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released Draft Environmental Impact Statements (DEISs) that described potential impacts on environmental resources from the construction and operation of the flow-through dam.

To address the findings described in the DEISs, the facility has undergone considerable design revisions, and the mitigation plan has been enhanced to provide a robust suite of actions that target multiple natural resources.

Most of the time, the Chehalis River would move freely through the flow-through dam for flood control, allowing fish to pass upstream and downstream on their own. During major floods, however, the flow-through dam would allow normal winter flows to continue downstream while storing excess water in a temporary reservoir.

The stored water would slowly be released back to the river as conditions return to normal. With the flow-through design and no permanent storage of water — along with revised mitigation plans to improve habitat function throughout the Basin —- the goal is to provide significant flood protection benefits while avoiding, minimizing and mitigating the impacts to fish, wildlife, ecosystems and the community.

The Chehalis Basin is already experiencing more frequent and intense flooding, with the largest floods on record all occurring within the past 30 years. Flood risk in the Basin is expected to continue increasing in the future, making flood damage protection an increasingly important topic to residents in the Basin.

The August 2021 Comprehensive Flood Hazard Management Plan estimated that, for near-term future floods like the ones that occurred in the Basin in 1996 and 2007, the flow-through dam would reduce flood damage by about 70%, protect 1,700 people from displacement and prevent over $240 million in damage. By late-century (about 2080), catastrophic flooding is projected to cause nearly $670 million in damage each time a flood occurs; the flow-through dam would prevent about $330 million of that damage.

The flow-through dam is one option for flood protection being analyzed as part of the Chehalis Basin Strategy, a holistic set of actions aimed at reducing flood damage and restoring fish habitat.

See ChehalisBasinStrategy.com to learn more about the Chehalis Basin Strategy and visit ChehalisRiverBasinFCZD.com to read more about updates to the flow-through dam for flood control and benefits of the facility.

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Updated information available regarding proposed flood retention facility in Chehalis Basin

The Chehalis River Basin Flood Control Zone District has released a new website with updated information about the proposed flood retention facility near Pe Ell.

The District is proposing a structure called a flow-through dam for flood control, an innovative solution from the United Nations Environment Programme that minimizes impacts to the environment and river while reducing flood risk in the Basin.

In response to community feedback, the updated design includes new engineering elements to mimic the natural river and allow fish to swim freely through the structure when the facility is not operating — in other words, except when there is a major flood event.

This means the structure will provide significant flood protection benefits while avoiding, minimizing and mitigating the impacts to fish, wildlife, ecosystems and the community outlined in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement.

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Visit ChehalisRiverBasinFCZD.com to read more about updates to the design and benefits of the facility, and to view a short video showing how this state-of-the-art structure would operate.

The Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association has been awarded $27.5 million from the federal Department of Energy to start the first phase of planning for the regional production, storage, transportation and use of hydrogen fuel.

Lewis County Transit, a participant in the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub, is the first transit agency in Washington to take delivery of hydrogen fuel cell buses as part of the move toward hydrogen powered vehicles. It has three new coaches that are undergoing testing this summer before anticipated entry into service around November/December.

The award made the region’s federally designated “Hydrogen Hub” the second of seven in the country to get funding (California’s was the first). Over the next decade, the hub — a collaboration of public and private organizations and businesses — may receive up to $1 billion from the 2021 Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act. In the Pacific Northwest, most of that federal money will be leveraged for at least four times as much in private and local investment.

During Phase 1, the nonprofit Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association (aka PNWH2) will spend the next 12 to 18 months helping develop at least eight projects across Washington, Oregon and Montana.

Each of the projects in the Pacific Northwest hub will produce or use “green” electrolytic hydrogen fuel, which is made by using renewable

energy sources to power the electrolysis process that rips hydrogen atoms from the oxygen in water molecules. The renewable energy will come from the region’s abundant hydropower, as well as wind and solar.

The hope is that the eight projects, which the association refers to as “nodes,” will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in energy intensive industries, potentially replacing fuel sources in high-heat manufacturing, heavy duty transportation, and fertilizer production.

“PNWH2 is going to speed up our decarbonization efforts and the transition to a clean energy economy,” U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, said in a news release the day funding was announced. “I’m thrilled to be a partner in this fight with PNWH2 and can’t wait to see the incredible impact they have on our region.”

Chris Green, the president of PNWH2, said in a webinar last week that the hub has a unique challenge ahead.

“We have to basically create supply and demand for a new energy commodity at the same time, and that’s not been done as far as I know anytime recently,” Green said.

He later tells the Inlander that while there are some imperfect analogues — say, the petroleum industry in its early years, or the iPhone coming on the scene in 2007 and paving the way for a transition to smartphones — historic examples show that the supply has to be ready once you’ve built the demand.

“When we convince others, by whichever means — by incentive or by some regulation — that they need to buy that product or should buy that product,” Green says, “we need to have enough supply for it, ready to go.”

All but one of the eight nodes in the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association are focused on producing hydrogen fuel for heavy-duty transportation needs along major interstate corridors, and public transit. The other project will use green hydrogen to produce ammonium nitrates needed for fertilizer, which are often currently made using fossil fuel inputs.

Part of the reason for the focus on heavy-duty transportation is because heavy-duty vehicles are likely the first customers that will be ready to use hydrogen fuel.

“In transit for example, you can buy hydrogen fuel cell buses now, many transit agencies are buying these, so that part of the value chain is prepared to produce that equipment,” Green says. “Right next to it … would be long-haul trucking, because there are fuel cell trucks you can buy right now.”

While some of those vehicles may be expensive at the moment, they already exist in the market in North America and Europe, so the next step is just being able to produce the fuel and get it where it’s needed, Green says.

Getting those kinds of vehicles to transition in a significant way will also help with an overall goal of the hubs, which is to stabilize the price of hydrogen and make it affordable, Green says.

“I don’t know that we’ll get to the point where we have kind of the global stability we have like on gasoline, but the idea is that you get the price to stabilize and the best way to do that is to get lots of long-term offtake customers, and then hopefully the rest will come online,” Green says. “Those value chains need to catch up: the cruise ship lines, the Maersk shipping vessels, those boats are being ordered, and some of them are being built, but that takes awhile to replace those huge fleets.”

As the hub works through the National Environmental Policy Act process in coming months, individual projects may be able to move into the second phase sooner than others, he says. The hub will be able to manage that so no project is held up because another one isn’t quite ready.

Green says he’s looking forward to the work ahead, even though the progress may not be linear.

“For the next eight years of this hub, it’s going to be bumpy, and we’re going to have to just keep at it and see if we can make sure these customers appear and start buying the product,” Green says. “This is a transition. It’s going to take a few decades, probably, to be able to really look back and say, ‘OK, is that work that we did back in the early 2020s, did that work?’ It’s going to be hard to tell for a little while.”

The ingredients to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are there, though, and there’s more global capital being invested in this than ever before, Green says.

“I think we really are making some of the early stages of the overall industrial transportation transition to greener energy,” Green says.