August 19, 2013 [Contra Costa Times] - A huge parcel of industrial land and the city's waterfront would be transformed into a facility to unload crude oil from ships and rail cars, store it in giant round tanks, then send it through pipelines to local refineries under a $200 million development proposal.
Backers of the plan say it will bring jobs and revenue to the city while helping refineries use more domestic crude oil to meet their supply needs.
After the project’s draft environmental impact report was released last year, WesPac Energy-Pittsburg LLC opted to add rail delivery of domestic crude oil to the proposal, which originally called for only imported crude oil to be delivered by ships to a marine terminal.
The revised project will be able to offload an average of 242,000 barrels a day of crude oil or partially refined crude oil from both ships and rail cars.
The project will strengthen the Bay Area’s oil storage and transfer capacity, according to Art Diefenbach, vice president of engineering at Irvine-based WesPac.
Adding rail delivery was in response to a request made by oil refineries, which are looking to use more domestic crude oil from Midwest oil fields, he said.
But the rail component will also be beneficial to air quality, according to Diefenbach.
“The rail portion of our project benefits air quality in the San Francisco Bay Area because crude oil delivered by rail has less than one tenth of the air emissions per barrel compared with crude oil delivered by ship,” he wrote in an email.
Similar projects that use rail cars to deliver crude are being developed elsewhere in California, including Benicia, where city officials are considering a use permit for the Valero refinery to offload 70,000 barrels a day of North American crude oil by rail.
WesPac has an option to buy the 125-acre parcel where the storage tanks are located from NRG, an energy company that operates a power plant on the site, if the required approvals are obtained.
Up to 225 jobs would be created during the construction phase, while the finished facility would provide about 40 permanent full-time jobs.
The project, which would take about two years to complete, calls for existing facilities and equipment to be replaced, upgraded and repaired to bring the facility into compliance with industry standards and regulatory requirements.
Once used by Pacific Gas and Electric to store fuel oil that was burned to generate electricity, the 16 empty tanks would be replaced, repaired or retrofitted to store crude oil.
