A few months ago, the Portland community woke up to learn that there was a secret plan to turn our city into a hub for exporting tar sands crude oil. A Texas company, Zenith Energy, bought a moribund asphalt terminal at the Port of Portland and was surreptitiously expanding the facility to export Canadian tar sands. While city officials decried this move by Zenith, who creatively found a loophole in Portland’s fossil fuel infrastructure ban, several months later it’s not clear what steps can be taken to shut this operation down.
On July 15, the city held a community forum where hundreds of people gathered to listen to testimony and get a sense of what the city plans to do. On this episode of Locus Focus we hear excerpts from this event.
Last month the Oregonian revealed that Zenith executive lied to Portland city officials about exporting tar sands oil through their facility: https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2019/08/portland-oil-terminal-execs-gave-mayors-staff-false-information.html?fbclid=IwAR3Ulz2gGyyIuAiqN1qtHJtkiJapAIy02nuHqK0iIdcy9AN_uzUinjjEeFg
- KBOO