Oregon’s entire fuel supply chain is hanging by a thread after Phillips 66 made clear in recent corporate filings that it is actively divesting up to $3 billion in refinery assets – including the Ferndale refinery in Washington, the single most critical facility supplying gasoline and diesel to Portland and much of the state.
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.
