Phillips 66 has applied for Air District permission to launch what clearly looks like yet another tar sands project.
Read the Notice of Preparation here in order to tell the Air District what you think should be covered in an analysis of the impacts of P66’s latest attempt to expand its tar sands refining. Please weigh in with written comments.
According to the Air District project description, this P66 wharf expansion “would increase the amount of crude and gas oil brought by ship to the Marine Terminal at the Phillips 66 San Francisco Refinery in Rodeo, California. The refinery processes crude oil delivered by ship from a variety of domestic and foreign sources to the Marine Terminal, as well as crude oil received from central California by pipeline.”
The marine terminal expansion would enable P66 to receive and process higher rates of ship-delivered crude and gas oil, replacing roughly equivalent volumes of pipeline-delivered crudes with shipborne crudes.
What exactly is going on here? The Notice assures us that the amount of oil refined at Rodeo will remain stable, but the proposed wharf capacity is greater than the total refining capacity of the entire Rodeo plant! Also keep in mind that the Rodeo plant processes all the semi-refined oil from Phillips’ Santa Maria plant. Santa Maria cannot send that oil via water and relies on sending it to the Rodeo plant via pipeline in order to finish making it into usable motor fuels. Does Phillips intend to close the Santa Maria plant? If so, what is the closure plan?
Two prior Air District approvals allowed P66 to increase its permitted limits from 30,682 barrels per day (bbl/day) in 2012, to 51,182 bbl/day in 2013. Now P66 seeks a permit increase of 78,818 bbl/day to 130,000 bbl/day, on an annual rolling average basis. It also wants to increase crude or gas oil deliveries from 59 ships up to a total of 135 tankers or ships in any 12 consecutive months.
In addition to these significant changes in quantity, we’re also probably looking at big changes in the quality of the oil being delivered. What exactly are the “characteristics of crude oil and gas oil” to be delivered? How are these characteristics especially relevant to the effects from oil spills? To the effects from refining them?
The Notice of Preparation isn’t as heavy a slog as you might think. Please read it carefully and suggest areas of significant impact that the DEIR must cover.
Here are some useful comments on marine impacts of a tar sands spill:
Baykeeper Comments on Phillips 66 Marine Terminal Permit Revision Projectthe
tar-sands-tanker-threat-ip
tar-sands-health-effects-IB
NAS 2015 Dilbit Study Final
west-coast-tar-sands-threat-report
Green et al. – 2017 – Oil sands and the marine environment current know
Sign Baykeeper petition opposing the expansion here
Send email or written comments by 5 pm, August 28, 2017 to:
Barry Young, Senior Advanced Projects Advisor
Engineering Division
Bay Area Air Quality Management District
375 Beale St., Ste. 600
San Francisco, CA 94105
Email: P66MarineTerminalPermit Revision[at]baaqmd.gov
For more information, contact Barry Young: byoung[at]baaqmd.gov.
Keep Tar Sands Out of the Bay Area!