The warning follows the company’s abrupt December 2024 shutdown of its 139,000-barrel-per-day Los Angeles refinery a move that erased a major piece of West Coast refining capacity overnight.
Now, with Ferndale firmly in the crosshairs, energy analysts, trucking associations, and rural Oregon communities are sounding the alarm: the state has no refineries of its own, no meaningful backup import route, and only 10-15 days of fuel storage – barely half the national average.

The Olympic Pipeline: Oregon’s Fragile Artery Nearly all of Oregon’s
~100,000 barrels per day of gasoline and diesel demand flows through one aging 400-mile lifeline: the Olympic Pipeline. The line carries refined products south from Washington’s five refineries – BP Cherry Point, Phillips 66 Ferndale, Marathon Anacortes, Shell Puget Sound, and U.S. Oil Tacoma directly into Portland’s storage terminals.

When the pipeline suffered a brief maintenance shutdown in September 2025, pump prices spiked within hours, not days. AAA Oregon reported stations scrambling to ration inventory as panic buying set in. The state’s razor-thin storage cushion means any sustained disruption – whether from maintenance, mechanical failure, regulatory shutdown, or divestiture- risks running dry in under two weeks.