This is one of many articles in the Mercury’s 2026 Climate Issue. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you’re feeling generous and want to keep these types of articles coming, support us here.—eds.
An industrial sacrifice zone rests in a remarkable place on the west banks of the Willamette River, a mile north of downtown Portland. Its backyard is the Tualatin Mountain Range, where hundreds of bird species and other wildlife inhabit the forest, stretching from a quaint neighborhood to the Pacific Ocean.
“It’s beautiful here,” said Nancy Hiser, an area resident. “We’ve got four mountain views. You’re on the river. You’re 15 minutes from downtown.”
The industrial area known as the Critical Energy Infrastructure (CEI) Hub sits across Highway 30 from Hiser’s house. The location offers marine, rail, and interstate access to import and export liquid fuels across the region. Along the six-mile stretch, 11 bulk fuel terminals hold 90 percent of Oregon’s liquid fuels—including gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and other products—in 630 tanks. That’s 396 million gallons of fuel capacity. Many Portlanders fear it could blow up, spill into the river, or release harmful vapors in a disaster.
Hiser is a founding member of Tank the Tanks, an advocacy group for CEI Hub safety. After buying a house on the hills overlooking the tanks in 2014, she and other Portlanders started learning about the dangers earthquakes pose to the tanks.
Hiser and others remain concerned about an inevitable “Big One” earthquake, particularly due to its projected impacts on the industrial area. The Cascadia Subduction Zone is a tectonic plate boundary in the Pacific Ocean that stretches from Vancouver, B.C. to Northern California, roughly 100 miles from land. And it is overdue for a seismic shift, which experts say could generate a magnitude 9.0 megathrust earthquake. That could wreak havoc on the Oregon Coast and potentially reach the CEI Hub.
An earthquake isn’t the only safety concern. The hills of Forest Park, directly above the hub, are vulnerable to landslides or heavy rains. And wildfires threaten safety from both directions. A fire starting at the CEI Hub could ignite Forest Park and the homes inside, or conversely, a park fire could set the Hub aflame.
What to do with the CEI Hub over the next decade is complicated, and a host of competing interests are trying to figure it out. Hiser is one of a growing number of activists, along with groups including Columbia and Willamette Riverkeeper, 350PDX, Braided River Campaign, and many others, demanding governments prioritize public safety at the CEI Hub, including by reducing the tanks’ capacity.
The CEI Hub is also central to conversations about Oregon’s overall fossil fuel consumption, and the adoption of renewable fuels. Industry proponents say companies need to expand infrastructure to meet demand for lower-carbon fuels, including aviation fuels, saying any regulations the local government considers should make an exception for “renewable” fuels. But those fuels pose similar safety and environmental risks in the event of a spill or a tank failure at the CEI Hub, according to city documents. Tribes that historically lived on these lands have ideas too, but city planners appear to have engaged them only in cursory discussions.
This fall, a major Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS) policy package will come before City Council to address three interrelated issues at the CEI Hub. One piece would amend the city’s zoning code to limit the expansion of bulk fuel storage capacity at the CEI Hub. That would limit renewable and aviation fuel capacity as well, rather than just fossil fuels as they are currently defined in city code. The second tweak is more conceptual: an update to the city’s 2035 comprehensive plan that outlines how city policy should regulate land use and fuel storage. Lastly, a major piece of the project is a drawdown timeline, requiring the 11 companies at the CEI Hub to reduce fuel storage capacity by 20 percent by 2036.
A node in the global web
The BPS draft plan says the primary purpose of the project is to “support safety and risk reduction for existing bulk fuel facilities within the CEI Hub.”
While its footprint is relatively small, the CEI Hub is one node in an international web of fossil fuel import and export facilities. The Olympic pipeline is the main source for Oregon, importing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Russian and other oil through Anacortes, Washington to Portland. It feeds a line that passes through the Hub, operated by Kinder Morgan, which delivers jet fuel to the Portland International Airport. The company’s pipelines also run to Eugene, Oregon to distribute fuel in and out of state.
After it took over a former asphalt terminal at the CEI Hub in 2014, Houston-based Zenith Energy began transporting Bakken crude oil from Canada and other fuels by train across the West, including through Portland on their way to and from the Hub. Advocates are concerned that trains transporting flammable fuels through residential neighborhoods put residents at risk of an explosion in the event of a derailment.
Meanwhile, Zenith has promised the city it will remove 30 of its storage tanks by 2028, and transition entirely to renewable fuels by 2027—part of a relentless effort to expand its storage and rail operations and achieve its vision of Portland as a preeminent “renewable fuels hub” for the West Coast. That could see liquid fuels and fuel stocks transported between Portland, California, and Singapore.
A Miami-based investment firm agreed to purchase Zenith’s operations, but a major piece of the deal hinges on the city transferring a controversial contract to the new company—another Hub-related action this fall. Advocates want safety precautions and third-party enforcement included in the transfer deal. Zenith sued the city in July, saying that the public process is unreasonably delaying the approval.
Advocates are skeptical of industry narratives in favor of expanded infrastructure, even for “renewable fuels.” In the 1970s, oil companies like Shell, ExxonMobil, and BP downplayed scientists’ warnings about greenhouse gas emissions, engaging in a decades-long campaign to deceive the public, expand infrastructure worldwide, and increase profits.
Amid global threats from climate change, local leaders are also tasked with solving an acute threat posed by natural disasters in Oregon. A 2022 Multnomah County report showed that many CEI Hub tanks were built in the 1950s prior to seismic safety codes, on land that is vulnerable to liquefaction. In other words, the loosely-packed soil beneath the storage tanks, holding millions of gallons of liquid fuels, could fracture or slide, causing piping, pumps, and the tanks themselves to fail.
Because of these risks, an essential piece of the BPS package—a drawdown program—would require CEI Hub terminals to reduce their total capacity. It would require companies to report existing tank inventory and capacity in 2027, to then calculate a hub-wide 20 percent reduction by 2036. That piece of the plan sees opposition from all sides, for different reasons.
BPS spokesperson Aster Bloem said the three aspects of the proposed plan are expected to be presented to Council at the same time, as two separate ordinances—one for the zoning and comprehensive plan, and another for the drawdown program. But City Council has the discretion to decide how it amends and adopts the ordinances.
Industry-aligned companies and their government partners have pushed back on the drawdown proposal. Port of Portland spokesperson Melanni Rosales said the Port—which oversees Portland’s airport—maintains a goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 through aviation, marine, and other facilities within its purview. It is also supporting airline companies’ efforts to do the same, including by scaling up the use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) at the airport. SAF is a blend of traditional jet fuel and biofuels that can cut emissions on a given flight by 25 percent, and up to 40 percent for some particulates. However, the airport’s annual jet fuel demand is expected to increase by 52 percent by 2035, and 72 percent—to 305 million gallons—by 2045.
The Port argues the drawdown plan should exempt aviation fuel, arguing the reduced capacity may “artificially constrain” supply of SAF and slow airlines’ efforts to adopt it. The Port has said additional infrastructure is necessary at the CEI Hub to achieve their aims, noting that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified SAF as a leading emissions reduction strategy for the aviation sector.
Those economic and supply concerns mirror other industry testimony, among them Phillips 66, Working Waterfront Coalition, and the Western States Petroleum Association.
BPS says the drawdown regulations were informed by modeling that projects a decline in fuel demand over time. Bloem said the model projected fuel demand will be less than what the CEI Hub can currently store, “indicating that a portion of existing capacity could be removed while continuing to meet Oregon’s projected fuel needs.”
As written, advocates don’t love the drawdown plan either. They want the Council to take on that aspect separately, after it handles the other changes. That’s because the plan in its current form changes the capacity of the tanks—not necessarily the amount of fuels flowing through the pipes. Tanks aren’t always full, and companies may be allowed to transfer from one tank to another. So, it’s unclear how much the plan would materially reduce the amount of fuel stored there. Advocates also say the timeline is too slow if the city wants to avoid a disaster.
“We’ve been at this a decade,” Hiser said. “How much more time do we have?”
Tribal Consultation
The city’s comprehensive plan acknowledges that the CEI Hub has not always existed where the riverbanks meet the forest. The plan is a guide for how the city should approach land use planning through 2035, including its approach to environmental justice.
“Environmental justice is borne from the recognition that communities of color, low-income communities, Limited English Proficient (LEP) communities, and Sovereign tribes have been disproportionately impacted from public and private decision-making, including planning, development, monitoring and enforcement, while often being excluded from those decisions themselves,” the comprehensive plan reads.
Human settlement began along Portland’s rivers because the land offered food, natural resources, trade, and transportation for Native Tribes. But white settlers expelled Indigenous people to reservations in the 1800s, keeping the land now called Portland. By its own rules, the city is broadly expected to coordinate with other governments to ensure its plans support the longstanding cultural practices of Tribal Nations—sovereign people who maintain rights to the water, as outlined in various federal treaties.
What that can or should look like depends on who you ask.
Asked to describe what consultation looked like throughout its CEI Hub efforts, Bloem said BPS consulted most closely with the Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde. In their testimony on the proposal,the Grande Ronde Tribe noted the importance of consultation, and urged the city to protect humans, water, and wildlife.
“Water is sacred to the Tribe and must be treated with utmost care and respect,” the testimony reads. “Water gives life to many of the Tribe’s First Foods including endangered and threatened salmon who make their journey south past the CEI Hub, over Willamette Falls and to the upper reaches of the Willamette River Basin to spawn.”
Candice Jimenez, a citizen of Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and board chair of the Portland Harbor Community Coalition (PHCC), told the Mercury that true Tribal consultation provides a venue to discuss and address issues affecting Tribal communities. She added that while she doesn’t speak for all Tribes in Oregon, decision-making should ideally involve all sovereign Tribal governments—including Oregon’s nine federally recognized Tribes and those with ancestral homelands from Washington to California—as equal government-to-government partners in policy development.
In March 2025, PHCC developed a framework for how the city could fully engage in Tribal consultation, recommending Council establish a binding policy across city bureaus. The organization recommended establishing ongoing training on Tribal history and intergovernmental relations, and regular evaluation of policies to ensure transparency with Tribal governments.
That means Tribal consultation would be activated in any space across the city, county, and state when the policy impacts the land, water, air, and culturally significant resources. Jimenez said if just one Tribe responds to initial city communications, it should automatically trigger Tribal consultation with every other Tribe. City staff could travel to the Tribal community for meetings, placing the two governments on equal footing.
“Who is building the system?” Jimenez said. “This is the system that has been built, but it also can be shifted. And especially when it comes to Tribal consultation, there’s creativity in how that even occurs.”
City Council will consider multiple CEI Hub-related policy items from August to the end of the year. Specific dates are to be determined, but environmental advocates are likely to show up, armed with the annals of a world forever transformed by fossil fuels. They always do.
