The Cherry Point Refinery is an

oil refinery An oil refinery or petroleum refinery is an industrial processes, industrial process Factory, plant where petroleum (crude oil) is transformed and refining, refined into useful products such as gasoline (petrol), diesel fuel, asphalt, asphalt ...

in the

northwest The points of the compass are a set of horizontal, radially arrayed compass directions (or azimuths) used in navigation and cartography. A compass rose is primarily composed of four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west—each ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

, near

Bellingham, Washington Bellingham ( ) is the most populous city in, and county seat of Whatcom County in the U.S. state of Washington. It lies south of the U.S.–Canada border in between two major cities of the Pacific Northwest: Vancouver, British Columbia (lo ...

, north of

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a port, seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the county seat, seat of King County, Washington, King County, Washington (state), Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in bo ...

. Owned by BP, is the largest refinery in

Washington state Washington (), officially the State of Washington, is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. Named for George Washington—the first U.S. president—the state was formed from the western part of the Washingto ...

(and was the 30th largest in the U.S. in 2015). The last refinery to be built from the ground up in the U.S., it is located about south of Blaine and northwest of Ferndale, a few miles south of the Canada–US border, on the

Strait of Georgia The Strait of Georgia (french: Détroit de Géorgie) or the Georgia Strait is an arm of the Salish Sea between Vancouver Island and the extreme southwestern mainland coast of British Columbia, Canada and the extreme northwestern mainland coast ...

between

Birch Bay Birch Bay is a protected bay of the east shore of the Salish Sea, between Semiahmoo Bay and Lummi Bay; approximately north of Seattle and south of Vancouver, BC, Canada. The bay gives its name to a census-designated place (CDP) along the bay' ...

and Lummi Bay. Completed in 1971, its design and construction was overseen by George W. Glade, CEO and President of Parsons Constructors, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ralph M. Parsons Company. It is the fourth largest refinery on the West Coast, and is the last major oil refinery built in the United States. The Cherry Point refinery supplies about 20% of the gasoline in Washington state. Originally an

Atlantic Richfield ARCO ( ) is a brand of gasoline stations currently owned by Marathon Petroleum after BP sold its rights. BP commercializes the brand in Northern California, Oregon and Washington, while Marathon has rights for the rest of the United States an ...

(ARCO) facility, the refinery became a BP operation in January 2002, following BP's April 2000 purchase of ARCO. The refinery was initially planned to be built closer to Seattle, at Kayak Point, northwest of Everett, but Atlantic Richfield abandoned those plans in October 1968 and built the facility at When first operational, Cherry Point had a capacity of about ; it currently processes over of

petroleum Petroleum, also known as crude oil, or simply oil, is a naturally occurring yellowish-black liquid mixture of mainly hydrocarbons, and is found in geological formations. The name ''petroleum'' covers both naturally occurring unprocessed crude ...

(crude oil) per day, with 90% becoming

gasoline Gasoline (; ) or petrol (; ) (see ) is a transparent, petroleum-derived flammable liquid that is used primarily as a fuel in most spark-ignited internal combustion engines (also known as petrol engines). It consists mostly of organic ...

diesel Diesel may refer to: * Diesel engine, an internal combustion engine where ignition is caused by compression * Diesel fuel, a liquid fuel used in diesel engines * Diesel locomotive, a railway locomotive in which the prime mover is a diesel engine ...

jet fuel Jet fuel or aviation turbine fuel (ATF, also abbreviated avtur) is a type of aviation fuel designed for use in aircraft powered by gas-turbine engines. It is colorless to straw-colored in appearance. The most commonly used fuels for commercial a ...

. It covers about . Most of Cherry Point's crude oil is from the

Alaska North Slope The Alaska North Slope ( Iñupiaq: ''Siḷaliñiq'') is the region of the U.S. state of Alaska located on the northern slope of the Brooks Range along the coast of two marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean, the Chukchi Sea being on the western si ...

. It is brought in by

petroleum tanker An oil tanker, also known as a petroleum tanker, is a ship designed for the bulk transport of oil or its products. There are two basic types of oil tankers: crude tankers and product tankers. Crude tankers move large quantities of unrefined c ...

s via the

Strait of Juan de Fuca The Strait of Juan de Fuca (officially named Juan de Fuca Strait in Canada) is a body of water about long that is the Salish Sea's outlet to the Pacific Ocean. The international boundary between Canada and the United States runs down the centre ...

and

Rosario Strait Rosario Strait is a strait in northern Washington state, separating San Juan County and Skagit and Whatcom Counties. It extends from the Strait of Juan de Fuca about north to the Strait of Georgia. The USGS defines its southern boundary as ...

and delivered directly to the refinery via the facility's tanker pier near a minor

headland A headland, also known as a head, is a coastal landform, a point of land usually high and often with a sheer drop, that extends into a body of water. It is a type of promontory. A headland of considerable size often is called a cape.Whittow, Joh ...

called Cherry Point, on the Strait of Georgia. The refinery received the first oil through the

Trans-Alaska Pipeline The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) is an oil transportation system spanning Alaska, including the trans-Alaska Petroleum, crude-oil Pipeline transport, pipeline, 11 Pumping station, pump stations, several hundred miles of feeder pipelines, ...

, transported aboard the ''ARCO Juneau'', in early The remainder of the crude comes from a

pipeline Pipeline may refer to: Electronics, computers and computing * Pipeline (computing), a chain of data-processing stages or a CPU optimization found on ** Instruction pipelining, a technique for implementing instruction-level parallelism within a s ...

connected to reserves in

Western Canada Western Canada, also referred to as the Western provinces, Canadian West or the Western provinces of Canada, and commonly known within Canada as the West, is a Canadian region that includes the four western provinces just north of the Canada� ...

. In January 2014 the refinery finished construction of a rail facility to import

Bakken crude The Bakken Formation () is a rock unit from the Late Devonian to Early Mississippian age occupying about of the subsurface of the Williston Basin, underlying parts of Montana, North Dakota, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The formation was initial ...

from

North Dakota North Dakota () is a U.S. state in the Upper Midwest, named after the indigenous Dakota Sioux. North Dakota is bordered by the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba to the north and by the U.S. states of Minnesota to the east, S ...

. The gasoline and diesel are primarily shipped to

filling station A filling station, also known as a gas station () or petrol station (), is a facility that sells fuel and engine lubricants for motor vehicles. The most common fuels sold in the 2010s were gasoline (or petrol) and diesel fuel. Gasol ...

s in Washington and

Oregon Oregon () is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of its eastern boundary with Idah ...

via the Olympic Pipeline and over-the-road fuel trucks. Jet fuel from Cherry Point Refinery accounts for 85% of the fuel used by the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Significant quantities of

calcined Calcination refers to thermal treatment of a solid chemical compound (e.g. mixed carbonate ores) whereby the compound is raised to high temperature without melting under restricted supply of ambient oxygen (i.e. gaseous O2 fraction of air), gene ...

coke Coke usually refers to: * Coca-Cola, a brand of soft drink **The Coca-Cola Company * Slang term for cocaine, a psychoactive substance and illicit drug Substances Soft drinks * Cola, any soft drink similar to Coca-Cola * Generic name for a soft d ...

are also produced and shipped to the nearby ALCOA

aluminium Aluminium (aluminum in AmE, American and CanE, Canadian English) is a chemical element with the Symbol (chemistry), symbol Al and atomic number 13. Aluminium has a density lower than those of other common metals, at approximately o ...

smelter Smelting is a process of applying heat to ore, to extract a base metal. It is a form of extractive metallurgy. It is used to extract many metals from their ores, including silver, iron, copper, and other base metals. Smelting uses heat and a c ...

. A fire in February 2012 caused the plant to be shut down for several weeks. A coal export facility known as the

Gateway Pacific Terminal The Gateway Pacific Terminal was a proposed export terminal at Cherry Point ( lut, Xwe’chi’eXen) in Whatcom County, Washington, along the Salish Sea shoreline. It was announced in 2011 and would have exported coal, but was opposed by local r ...

was proposed to be built here. The proposal was strongly opposed by the

Lummi Nation The Lummi ( ; Lummi: ''Xwlemi'' ; also known as Lhaq'temish (), or ''People of the Sea''), governed by the Lummi Nation, are a Native American tribe of the Coast Salish ethnolinguistic group. They are based in the coastal area of the Pacific No ...

, who argued that the proposal infringed on their rights under the

Treaty of Point Elliott The Treaty of Point Elliott of 1855, or the Point Elliott Treaty,—also known as Treaty of Point Elliot (with one ''t'') / Point Elliott Treaty—is the lands settlement treaty between the United States government and the Native American tribes ...

, and that it would have destroyed the local ecosystems of the local fisheries. The project was also opposed by the Sightline Institute and the

Sierra Club The Sierra Club is an environmental organization with chapters in all 50 United States, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico. The club was founded on May 28, 1892, in San Francisco, California, by Scottish-American preservationist John Muir, w ...

Beyond Coal The Beyond Coal movement is a campaign by environmental group the Sierra Club to promote renewable energy instead of coal. Their primary objective is to close coal power plants in the United States, including at least one-third of the country's mo ...

campaign. On May 9, 2016, the

United States Army Corps of Engineers , colors = , anniversaries = 16 June (Organization Day) , battles = , battles_label = Wars , website = , commander1 = ...

denied a permit to the project, citing the Lummi Nation's treaty-protected fishing rights. On July 27, 2021, the Whatcom County Council voted unanimously to ban new refineries, shipping terminals, or coal-fired power plants at Cherry Point.

References

External links

Fact Sheet, Cherry Point
BP
Oil Spot news
- Cherry Point to BP *Grossman, Zoltan C.. 2017.
Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands
'. Seattle: University of Washington Press / Indigenous Confluences. {{Authority control Oil refineries in Washington BP buildings and structures Energy infrastructure in Washington (state) Buildings and structures in Whatcom County, Washington Energy infrastructure completed in 1971 1971 establishments in Washington (state)

See also

References

External links