Plans to Reactivate Old PG&E Oil Storage in East Bay Shelved

An energy company has backed out of plans to reactivate an old PG&E oil storage and transfer terminal in Pittsburg, longtime opponents to the project announced Wednesday.

WesPac Midstream LLC initially filed an application in 2011 to modernize the terminal at 696 W. 10th St. near downtown Pittsburg by creating a new regional oil storage facility there.

On Nov. 16, the company withdrew the proposal. Art Diefenbach, vice president of engineering for the Irvine-based company, said the reason for the decision had to do with market forces.

Diefenbach said oil prices have fallen drastically -- giving potential customers cold feet -- since planning for the Pittsburg facility began seven or eight years ago.

“And we don’t see those prices rebounding,” Diefenbach said.

“The oil industry always evolves as things change,” he said. “California has just become a more expensive destination.”

The proposed project was stripped of a major component earlier this year when WesPac eliminated plans to load as many as five 104-car oil trainloads per week at the facility.

Regardless, Diefenbach said moving ahead with the project would have created jobs for an estimated 40 permanent, full-time operators and around 250 construction workers.

“We felt it was a good project from a business perspective and that it would have been good for the community,” Diefenbach said.

But local activists, whose efforts helped remove the project’s oil train component, disagree.

“We knew that WesPac was not good for our community and having them as our neighbor would do nothing to make Pittsburg a better place to live,” Kalli Graham, co-founder of the Pittsburg Defense Council, said in a statement.

Community groups had various reasons for opposing the project. For the Pittsburg Defense Council, it was safety concerns.

The group was part of a protest in Pittsburg in January 2014 to denounce the project, saying there was potential for it to expose residents to the danger of a crude oil leak or explosion.

The group continued a grassroots movement to protest the project afterward.

“We did everything we could to tell everyone who would listen that this project was wrong,” Graham said. “We canvassed our neighborhoods, lobbied our city and county officials and educated our community on the dangers this project would have on our town.”

Other groups contested the project for reasons that have to do with environmental protection and combating the fossil fuel industry.

Andrés Soto, a Richmond organizer with Communities for a Better Environment, claimed the project “was clearly designed to import dirty Canadian tar sands to Bay Area refineries.”

Included in the opposition were members of groups such as Forest Ethics, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and Sunflower Alliance.

They plan on celebrating the project’s end at a Pittsburg City Council meeting on Monday at 7 p.m.

“We wish to thank everyone who labored tirelessly to keep this potentially catastrophic project from being dumped in our backyard,” Gregory Osorio of the Pittsburg Ethics Council said in a statement.

--Bay City News Service, photo courtesy of the Pittsburg Defense Council