The High Price of Oil

We need only to look east across San Pablo Bay from the old shrimp-fishing village at San Rafael's China Camp to be reminded that our dependence on oil could exact a high price on what the Bay Area treasures — its natural environment.

Sitting on the opposite shore are five oil refineries, the second-largest production grouping in California. Combined, these refineries process millions upon millions of gallons of oil each day — all of it to satisfy what we can't seem to get enough of and more than half of it supplied by tankers that ply the turbid, shallow waters of this pocket of the greater San Francisco Bay.

Together, San Francisco and San Pablo bays form one of the largest Pacific Coast estuaries in both North and South America. Ten miles from west shore to east, its arch touching the shores of five counties, from Marin to Contra Costa, San Pablo Bay boasts one of the largest concentrations of wintering canvasbacks in North America.

Harbor seals pup in San Pablo Bay each spring; its shoreline protects the endangered, comely little salt marsh harvest mouse and the endangered California clapper rail, a waterbird so careful about being seen that it only eats when hidden behind taller vegetation.

San Pablo Bay's prolific eelgrass beds provide habitat for Pacific herring; monster-sized sturgeon in its shallow depths delight Bay Area anglers; salmon swim through it on their way home to spawn.

In short, San Pablo Bay, despite being a shell of what it was historically — expansive, wild and prolific — still teems with life. "It's a very special place," Kathi Bogmann, biologist with the Richardson Bay Audubon Center in Tiburon, assures.

For more than a century, oil refineries have been a part of this special place, their numbers and size increasing over the years as demand grew for what crude oil provides, starting with and led by gasoline and plastic, but also fertilizer, asphalt, rubber and thousands of petroleum-based staples, from nail polish to golf balls.

A Mixing of Water and Oil

Chevron’s Richmond refinery was the first to set up shop, founded in 1902 as Pacific Coast Oil. It is also the largest of the five refineries clustered around San Pablo Bay and its major tributary, the Carquinez Strait.

It is through the strait, at the point marked by the white Carquinez Bridge, that fresh water from the American and Sacramento rivers empties into the bay — water that is the lifeblood for San Pablo and San Francisco bay marshlands and mudflats, and for the abundance of birds, fish and other estuarine life they support.

And it is through San Pablo Bay waters that the refineries receive the crude oil they need to meet demand. Together, the refineries in San Pablo Bay and environs — along with Chevron including those operated by Shell, Tesoro, Valero and ConocoPhillips — have the capacity to process approximately 35 million gallons (or 833,000 barrels) of crude oil a day, every day of the year.

About half of that oil is used to produce gasoline; the rest is used for processing diesel and jet fuel, as well as other petroleum-based products.

Forty years ago, California not only processed the gasoline its residents used, as it does today. It also drilled all the crude needed to satisfy in-state demand — and had product left over to export. That's no longer true. Population growth and changes in California oilfield production, for reasons ranging from natural fluctuations in oil recovery to state regulations on new exploration and technologies, have altered the equation.

Our Energy Island

Today, around 40 percent of the crude oil needed by San Pablo Bay refineries to maintain capacity arrives overland through pipelines from Central and Southern California oil fields, despite a reduction in production still among the largest in the nation.

The rest is carried into San Pablo Bay by tanker, some of it domestic (from Alaska), but the majority imported from foreign oil-producing nations, Saudi Arabia, Ecuador and Iraq forming the top three sources.

Call it an act, or perhaps accident, of nature: California's geography — majestic mountains on one end, desert badlands on the other — is a striking but limiting factor: Water is the state’s primary highway for transporting oil.

"California is what's called an 'energy island,' meaning that any oil not produced in the state comes in by ship,” says Tupper Hull of the Western States Petroleum Association (WPPA), an oil-industry lobbying group based in Sacramento.

"From the standpoint of all other major refineries in the U.S., which are interconnected by a network of pipelines, California is unique."

In San Pablo Bay, shallow and heavily silted, that highway narrows considerably: the US Army Corps of Engineers continuously dredges a narrow channel to allow ship and tanker traffic to transit the bay and continue on to the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta.