The Cherry Point Refinery is an oil refinery in the northwestUnited States, near Bellingham, Washington, north of Seattle. Owned by BP, is the largest refinery in Washington state. The last refinery to be built from the ground up in the U.S., it is located about south of Blaine and northwest of Ferndale, a few miles south of the Canada–US border, on the Strait of Georgia between Birch Bay and Lummi Bay. Completed in 1971, its design and construction was overseen by George W. Glade, CEO and President of Parsons Constructors, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ralph M. Parsons Company. It is the fourth largest refinery on the West Coast, and is the last major oil refinery built in the United States. The Cherry Point refinery supplies about 20% of the gasoline in Washington state. Originally an Atlantic Richfield facility, the refinery became a BP operation in January 2002; BP acquired ARCO in April 2000. The refinery was intended to be closer to Seattle, at Kayak Point, northwest of Everett. Atlantic Richfield abandoned those plans in October 1968 and built the facility at When first operational, Cherry Point had a capacity of about ; it currently processes over of petroleum per day, with 90% becoming gasoline, diesel or jet fuel. It covers about. Most of Cherry Point's crude oil is from the Alaska North Slope. It is brought in by petroleum tankers via the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Rosario Strait and delivered directly to the refinery via the facility's tanker pier near a minorheadland called Cherry Point, on the Strait of Georgia. The refinery received the first oil through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, transported aboard the ARCO Juneau, in early The remainder of the crude comes from a pipeline connected to reserves in Western Canada. In January 2014 the refinery finished construction of a rail facility to import Bakken crude from North Dakota. The gasoline and diesel are primarily shipped to filling stations in Washington and Oregon via the Olympic Pipeline and over-the-road fuel trucks. Jet fuel from Cherry Point Refinery accounts for 85% of the fuel used by the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Significant quantities of calcinedcoke are also produced and shipped to the nearby ALCOAaluminium smelter. A fire in February 2012 caused the plant to be shut down for several weeks. A coal export facility known as the Gateway Pacific Terminal was proposed to be built here. The proposal was strongly opposed by the Lummi Nation, who argued that the proposal infringed on their rights under the Treaty of Point Elliott, and that it would have destroyed the local ecosystems of the local fisheries. The project was also opposed by the Sightline Institute and the Sierra Club'sBeyond Coal campaign. On May 9, 2016, the United States Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit to the project, citing the Lummi Nation's treaty-protected fishing rights.
