The Cherry Point Refinery is an

oil refinery An oil refinery or petroleum refinery is an industrial process plant where petroleum (crude oil) is transformed and refined into useful products such as gasoline (petrol), diesel fuel, asphalt base, fuel oils, heating oil, kerosene, lique ...

in the northwest

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 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

, 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 (loc ...

, north of

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

. 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 Washington ...

(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 between Birch 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 West Coast or west coast may refer to: Geography Australia * Western Australia *Regions of South Australia#Weather forecasting, West Coast of South Australia * West Coast, Tasmania **West Coast Range, mountain range in the region Canada * Britis ...

, 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 and ...

(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 crud ...

(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 co ...

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 engin ...

or jet fuel. 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 sid ...

. It is brought in by petroleum tankers 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 a ...

and delivered directly to the refinery via the facility's tanker pier near a minor headland 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 crude-oil pipeline, 11 pump stations, several hundred miles of feeder pipelines, and the Valdez Marine Terminal. TAPS is one o ...

, 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 init ...

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, So ...

. 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. Ga ...

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 Idaho. T ...

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), gener ...

coke are also produced and shipped to the nearby ALCOA

aluminium Aluminium (aluminum in American and Canadian English) is a chemical element with the symbol Al and atomic number 13. Aluminium has a density lower than those of other common metals, at approximately one third that of steel. I ...

smelter. 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 ...

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's Beyond Coal 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