Community activists and environmental groups have worried for more than a decade about the hundreds of millions of gallons of fuel stored in massive, aging tanks on unstable soil along Portland’s Willamette River.
On Thursday, after years of public meetings and voluminous public testimony, the Portland City Council is poised to impose a mandatory reduction in fuel storage at what’s known as the Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub, aimed at reducing the risk of catastrophic spills and fires during a major earthquake.
It’s a new approach but how much it will actually reduce the risk remains unclear.
The stakes extend well beyond Portland. The hub, stretching 6 miles along U.S. 30, between the Fremont Bridge and the southern tip of Sauvie Island, handles more than 90% of Oregon’s petroleum, biodiesel, liquefied natural gas and other fuels.
Brought in from outside the state, the fuels are stored at the hub and distributed across Oregon and parts of Washington to gas stations, airports and other commercial users. A spill or fire could cause major damage locally while disrupting fuel supplies across the state.
The city has restricted new fossil-fuel storage and expansion at the hub since 2016, surviving years of legal challenges from industry groups. But the harder question remains: what to do about the fuel in existing storage tanks, many built before modern seismic standards — especially as Oregon plans to transition away from fossil fuels.
Council Vice President Olivia Clark said the policy was a long-awaited step to enhance safety for Portland residents — and the entire state.
“This is really a turning point, I hope, for all of us,” Clark said during a meeting last month.
The City Council plan rests in part on the assumption that Oregonians will need far less liquid fuel as people switch to electric vehicles, drive less, bike more and use buses, trucks and airplanes that rely on renewable fuels instead of conventional gasoline and diesel.
Although Oregon’s Department of Energy has modeled a 70% decline in statewide fuel consumption by 2050, the agency cautioned the transition may take longer than the city anticipates. Federal policy changes have slowed electric vehicle sales and manufacturing while driving has not declined substantially and biking in Portland remains flat. Lower-carbon alternatives, including renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel, will still require storage and pose spill and fire risks.
“It frankly wouldn’t be possible to accurately forecast Oregon’s needs in 10 or 20 years as it’s difficult to predict transportation activities that far out,” Maxwell Woods, the department’s assistant director for nuclear safety and energy security, told The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Meanwhile, activists who pushed the city to act say the fuel reduction requirement may do little to reduce the amount of fuel actually stored at the hub, in part because neither the city nor the state knows precisely how much fuel is in the tanks. They had sought a stronger drawdown tied to actual fuel inventories and Oregon consumption rather than tank capacity.
“The fuel reduction requirement is really a stopgap,” said Nikki Mandell, a Portland activist with an advocacy group focused on reducing risks at the hub. “But it’s an important marker, a new program that did not exist before, and it commits the city to making it better.”
The proposed reduction plan
The drawdown plan would require bulk fuel terminal operators to reduce tank capacity by at least 20% by 2036. Utility storage such as the NW Natural liquefied natural gas tank and sustainable aviation fuel — a lower-carbon alternative made from used cooking oil, animal fats and other waste sources and the only fuel forecast to increase in the future — would be exempt.
The council will also vote on changes to the zoning code and the city’s long-range plan that guides land use and development that would further restrict expansion at the hub, allowing it only through a rigorous land-use review and without increasing overall storage capacity. Sustainable aviation fuel storage could increase by up to 5% of a terminal’s existing storage.
Councilors are likely to approve the policies because they carry little political risk: their impacts will be felt years from now and a future council can revise them at any time.
“If demand does go down, then I don’t see any reason not to require that operators at the hub reduce their storage capacity,” said Councilor Steve Novick who plans to support the fuel drawdown. “But we need to realize that unless demand goes down, the state’s not going to let us implement the drawdown.”
Novick also added a provision to the drawdown plan calling for more Portland Clean Energy Fund spending on transit, biking, walking and electric vehicles to reduce fossil fuel demand.
The 20% reduction would apply separately to each terminal and would be based on how much all of its tanks can hold, not how much fuel they actually contain. A 2022 Multnomah County report illustrates the difference: it estimated that active tanks at the hub had about 333 million gallons of total capacity but held about 234 million gallons on average, meaning they were roughly two-thirds full.
The city’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability said the 20% figure was informed by modeling from a city-hired consultant. It found that, with the reduction, the hub would continue to meet Oregon’s projected fuel needs, said city planner Tom Armstrong.
Armstrong said the city accounted for the state’s concerns by using a more conservative fuel-demand scenario that incorporates recent Trump administration policies.
The new code anticipates revisiting the drawdown mandate. The city administrator must recommend an alternative approach by June 2027, and the ordinance requires the city to begin collecting fuel inventories by fuel type, allowing a future council to base reductions on fuel volumes, not tank capacity.
“We need to know how much fuel is actually there to reduce it. If there’s less fuel, there’s less risk,” said activist Mandell.
The state and the fuel industry have also warned against cutting storage capacity too deeply, saying the hub provides an important buffer against supply disruptions in the region. That vulnerability was on display last year, when a leak shut down the Olympic Pipeline — the main pipeline carrying fuel from Washington refineries to Portland — for more than a week, prompting Oregon’s governor to declare a fuel emergency.
“In times of emergency, large fuel storage capacity acts as a buffer for Oregonians’ fuel needs,” said Woods, with the energy department.
Simply moving the hub elsewhere — as some advocates have demanded — isn’t feasible, Woods said. The hub is built around a regional network of pipeline, marine, rail and road connections from across the country. And the terminals are privately owned, meaning neither the state nor the city can dictate where they locate.
State officials also said Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’s new fuel tank seismic stability program — which requires large fuel terminals to assess their earthquake vulnerabilities and make plans to reduce those risks — is the most important tool for reducing earthquake risks at existing fuel tanks.
But activists point out that implementation of that program will take years and won’t eliminate the risk or limit expansion at the hub. And, said Mandell, Portland should not lean on the free market to reduce the fuel stored in the tanks, even if Oregon demand declines, because private operators can sell it outside the state.
Ultimately, she said, it’s up to lawmakers to diversify where Oregon stores its fuel rather than concentrating nearly all of it in one place.
“If something happens here,” she said, “the entire state is vulnerable.”
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