PORTLAND — The Portland City Council on Wednesday unanimously passed a first-in the country ban on new bulk fossil fuel storage facilities that commissioners hope will be replicated in other cities even as the incoming Trump administration signals its intent to dismantle federal climate change policies.
The new zoning ordinance bans new fossil fuel storage facilities in excess of 2 million gallons and forbids existing terminals from expanding in size. The move comes after a slew of proposals to locate fossil fuel export terminals in the Northwest, several of which remain active.
“The leadership on climate and sustainability rests with the cities,” Portland Mayor Charlie Hales said at Wednesday’s City Council meeting. “The science is real, and the mandate is ours.”
“This is the first stone in a green wall across the West Coast,” he said later at a news conference.
Call it the Pembina rule.
Eighteen months ago, the city was on the brink of approving Calgary-based Pembina Pipeline Corp.’s plan to build a propane export terminal at the Port of Portland’s Terminal 6, opposite West Hayden Island.
Hales was initially the project’s most prominent cheerleader, talking up the jobs, property taxes and climate benefits that would come from exporting a cleaner “bridge fuel” that Asian buyers could use to wean themselves off coal.
But he abruptly changed course in the spring of 2015 amid a vocal backlash by activists and Portland residents worried about the potential environmental and public safety risks of the terminal and the trains that would be used to supply it. The project died after Hales declined to bring a required zoning change to a final vote by the council, and none of the other commissioners was willing to break ranks despite heavy pressure from the business community.
Shortly afterward, Hales got religion on climate change. He returned from two-day summit at the Vatican with Pope Francis and mayors from around the globe fired up about cities’ crucial role in taking action on global warming, and specifically about developing a fossil fuel export policy.
Hales said Wednesday that his change of heart was inspired by Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change, which brought a moral dimension to the scientific debate, as well as the grass-roots pressure put on him by average Portlanders. He said he ultimately decided that Portland had far more jobs riding on clean energy than fossil fuels, and that Pembina’s project was not the right economic development strategy for the city.
The business community pushed hard for the Pembina project but was not a big player in the debate over the new policy.
Kinder Morgan, which operates the state’s big petroleum pipeline and a big tank farm in Northwest Portland, opposed the ban. The company said the policy would discourage new investments in the city’s fossil fuel storage infrastructure, most of which is located in a seismic liquefaction zone along the Willamette River.
The city considered allowing companies to expand their existing capacity by 10 percent if they performed seismic upgrades. But Kinder Morgan said that was too little to justify big investments, and the city ultimately decided against weakening the rule. Likewise, it declined a request from Northwest Natural to be exempted from the policy.
The policy change is a legacy issue for Hales and a major victory for climate activists, local high school students and environmental groups, who packed the council chamber Wednesday and broke into enthusiastic applause after the vote.
“Pembina was the proposal that served as a catalyst to make people aware of the immediate threat and the immediate opportunity the city had,” said Bob Sallinger, conservation director with the Portland chapter of the Audubon Society. “This was an epic grass-roots victory and it’s all the more important today because of what we have happening at the federal level.”
Indeed, activists are hoping that Portland’s policy has global significance and becomes a template for other cities to follow.
Companies producing a cross-section of fossil fuels — gasoline, natural gas, propane, methanol and coal — have proposed numerous projects to use the West Coast, and specifically the Columbia River, as a depot to export products to Asia.
There are four proposals pending on the Columbia, including three in Washington: an oil export terminal in Vancouver; a coal export terminal in Longview; and a methanol export terminal at the Port of Kalama.
