In the rainy months, when Tracy Prescott-MacGregor stomps on the ground in her produce garden, you can hear the water, just inches below the soil, slosh and ripple. “The water table is so high that if you dig about six inches, you’ll hit water,” she said. That’s what makes the soils here, on the Columbia River’s floodplain, so rich and productive.
Prescott-MacGregor and her husband retired to their farm in Clatskanie, Oregon, about an hour northwest of Portland, almost two decades ago. They raise goats and grow enough food to be nearly self-sufficient. “It’s really just a farmer’s dream come true,” she said.
“It’s really just a farmer’s dream come true.”
This stretch of the river is also crucial habitat for migrating salmon, which hold great significance for tribal nations. But now, local advocates worry that all this could be lost when a Houston-based renewable diesel company moves in. Next Renewable Fuels has proposed building a plant at Port Westward, a small industrial park with deep-water access on the Columbia River, just a stone’s throw from Prescott-MacGregor’s farm. By 2028, Next could produce more than 1.5 million gallons a day of what it calls low-carbon fuel for jets and diesel trucks, using waste products like animal fat and used cooking oils.
The plant is part of a renewable fuel boom, with producers promising to replace fossil fuels in difficult-to-decarbonize transportation sectors, like air travel and trucking. There are 37 sustainable aviation fuel projects under development across the United States, many supported by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and other federal subsidies. In 2023, the U.S. produced 2.5 billion gallons of renewable diesel, a 70% increase from 2022. Subsidies for crop-based biofuels typically enjoy bipartisan support, said Corey Stewart, a researcher at the clean energy think-tank RMI (formerly Rocky Mountain Institute), though the Trump administration’s stance on the industry is uncertain.
Renewable diesel and petroleum-based fuels are nearly identical chemically, so switching them is relatively simple. “Renewable diesel on the market gives companies an option to reduce carbon emissions without electrifying the fleet all at once,” Stewart said. “We can’t really wait for (technologies like) airplane electrification and hydrogen to come online in the mid-2040s.”
Next estimates that its $3 billion facility would bring 240 jobs to Columbia County, plus $45 million in state and local tax revenues annually. Labor unions along with the county, port and school district all support the project. “We feel good about the state’s (environmental) oversight,” said Sean Clark, executive director of the Port of Columbia County, which oversees Port Westward. “And having a good tenant that wants to have a green footprint as much as possible.”
IN ADDITION TO THEIR concerns about local ecosystems, however, critics of the project say that the hype around biofuels amounts to little more than greenwashing once the carbon costs are fully accounted for. The industry has a mixed track record: Used cooking oil alone cannot satisfy the demand for ingredients, and if producers turn to corn and soybeans, that drastically escalates the resulting fuel’s carbon intensity.
A 2024 report from the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog nonprofit, shows that biofuel plants emit particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde and other carcinogens, and often rely on fossil fuels to power the refining process. “These companies have made big claims about their environmental benefits, and I think they’re just that: claims,” said Kira Dunham, the report’s lead author. For example, the company behind one proposed renewable diesel facility in Louisiana, which planned to turn wood into sustainable aviation fuel, based its emissions models on an hourlong test of a single gram of wood, the report found. “There are other places we can invest federal funds to reduce emissions,” Dunham said.
Next bills itself as a clean fuel producer, but its refining process could produce up to 1 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually, according to its permit applications — about the same as burning 98 million gallons of petroleum diesel. “It’s really just the antithesis of the sort of climate progress that our state is working towards,” said Audrey Leonard, a staff attorney at Columbia Riverkeeper, an environmental nonprofit that is challenging Next’s permits in court.
Next’s facility is one of a handful of heavy industry proposals on the Columbia River in recent years, from oil transportation through pipelines and railcars to natural gas power plants. It’s particularly worrisome that the plant would be in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, said Theodora Tsongas, an environmental health scientist and volunteer with Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility. Scientists expect that sometime in the coming decades, an earthquake strong enough to liquify soil will hit the area, making a massive fuel spill inevitable.
And a project this size could impact almost every fish up and down the Columbia River, undoing decades of work that tribes have undertaken to restore salmon populations, said Jeremy FiveCrows, a member of the Nez Perce Tribe and the communications director for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, or CRITFC. The commission, which works to maintain the health of the region’s salmon, is composed of the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. Collectively, they co-manage fisheries along the river. “The system is so interconnected that even if something is theoretically acceptable at one location, it’s a pinch point,” FiveCrows said. “Every single Columbia Basin fish will have to swim by that site.”
To build the facility, Next would fill in just over 100 acres of sensitive wetlands and pave 76 acres in flood-prone sloughs. It would be the state’s largest authorized loss of wetlands in 10 years, according to a 2021 Army Corps of Engineers memo. Oregon regulations require rebuilding destroyed wetlands, but that in itself will alter the landscape drastically, said Elijah Cetas, an attorney and energy policy specialist with CRITFC. “The idea that you can just mitigate by taking one acre here and putting it elsewhere doesn’t take into consideration the comprehensive context of the river that salmon need throughout their lifecycle.”
“Every single Columbia Basin fish will have to swim by that site.”
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality has approved Next’s air and water quality permits, while the state’s land use board has approved a rail line that would connect the plant to fossil fuel storage hubs in other parts of the state. (Next and the DEQ did not respond to requests for comment.) The plant still needs a few more state and federal permits, as well as the Army Corps’ environmental impact statement. That could offer opponents more opportunities to challenge the project.
Today, the industrial park at Port Westward is mostly a minor nuisance for its neighbors. Sometimes, odd rotten-egg smells emanate from an existing ethanol plant’s flare stacks, and the sound of train horns reverberates through the otherwise tranquil, forested hills. When a large ship passes Clatskanie, Prescott-MacGregor can feel her house shake as the water underneath the soil undulates. “These farmlands are all connected by the waterways — that’s what makes it so wonderful,” she said. “What gets into any of the waterways will get into the food. There’s no way around that.”
