Pipeline not for us

Last week my neighbor counted 10 surveyors in orange vests out in the open space where my husband and I walk our dog in Silver Creek. They were working for HF Sinclair, a Dallas-based oil company that wants to run a new fuel pipeline through our neighborhood on its way to Salt Lake City. Most of us had no idea. I only knew because another neighbor forwarded me the route maps HF Sinclair gave the Salt Lake City Council. Nobody gave them to us. The project is called Westline Connect. The short version: HF Sinclair’s Pioneer Pipeline already carries gas, diesel and jet fuel from Wyoming to North Salt Lake, and they want to bump it from about 60,000 to 95,000 barrels per day, with more phases after that. The draft maps show the new line crossing under the Weber River or Silver Creek, cutting through Silver Creek Estates and Glenwild, then following I-80 toward Parleys. The company says the route isn’t final. They’d start digging in 2028. That fuel isn’t for us. HF Sinclair told its investors the point is to fix supply shortfalls in Nevada and California. Utah already exports more of these fuels than it uses, and the state’s own energy office projects our demand falling over the next 20 years even as we grow. This is a pass-through line. HF Sinclair gets the revenue. Summit County gets the trench. What the maps don’t show is what’s underneath: the aquifer that feeds the private wells and the little water districts thousands of us in the basin drink from every day. Pipelines beat trucks on safety, and the company says it will follow every rule on the books. But good intentions don’t stop leaks. HF Sinclair’s own track record is worth a look. In 2024, a subsidiary paid $7.4 million in Clean Water Act penalties for a crude spill in Oklahoma. In December 2025, federal regulators said the same subsidiary skipped required valve inspections for two years on its existing crude line between Arepi and Kimball Junction. Salt Lake City got a staff report and consultant maps, and its staff have already told the council the route hits the city’s main drinking-water protection zone. What did Summit County get? Surveyors in our open space, and letters from Westline Connect’s lawyers showing up in mailboxes. One homeowner who said no to a survey was told the company had already let the sheriff know it planned to come in anyway. Here’s the part that should bother everyone in the county, well or no well. A new state law, HB 575, handed pipeline permitting to the Utah Department of Environmental Quality and put it on a 120-day clock. Our own county planning director has said the county can’t veto a route. So the calls that matter will get made in Salt Lake, on a deadline, by people who will never fill a glass from the Silver Creek aquifer. There’s an obvious question nobody has answered. The Pioneer line already runs from Echo Junction down Weber Canyon to North Salt Lake. Why not just upgrade that pipe to the size they need? It would be the same distance, roughly the same steel, with no new corridor through anyone’s neighborhood. The company’s FAQ says the Weber Canyon route is too close to the river, which is a strange thing to say about a plan that puts new pipe alongside and under the Weber River out here. Here’s what we must demand: HF Sinclair: Show us a Summit County route map and a groundwater study, like you did for Salt Lake City, before you lock anything in. And show your math on why upgrading the Weber Canyon line isn’t the better option for Utah. County Council: Hold a public meeting out here in the basin, and tell us straight whether the pipeline setback and spill-notification rules you passed in 2014 and 2015 still mean anything. Utah Department of Environmental Quality: Commit now to a real comment period in Summit County when the application lands, not a notice buried on a state website. And neighbors: If you’re on a well or a small water district along the corridor, get your water tested this year. If something goes wrong later, you will want proof of what clean looked like. None of this kills the pipeline. It just means that if HF Sinclair builds it, they do it after answering to the people living on top of it. Right now the surveyors are here and the answers aren’t. Caroline Gleich Silver Creek The post Pipeline not for us appeared first on Park Record.