Tell President Biden and the Coast Guard to stop SPOT – the Sea Port Oil Terminal

Nov 22 Update: The Biden Administration has unfortunately (and frustratingly) approved the application for the Sea Port Oil Terminal (SPOT). This is the offshore oil export terminal we told you about a few moths ago (see below for the original post) that will increase cancer-causing air pollutants in Texas’ Brazoria and Harris counties and make climate change worse.

This is an abject breakdown of climate leadership from the Biden administration – but the fight is not over. The companies behind SPOT still have to apply for other state and federal permits, submit detailed construction plans, and more before MARAD issues the license. You can still send a letter to President Biden telling him to intervene and reject the project along with our allies at People vs Fossil Fuels. 

You can also help amplify our opposition to SPOT using this toolkit. Or for a quick action retweet or share our social posts below:

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Here’s our original SPOT post for Dec 2021:

Fossil Fuel companies are racing to build a new generation of fossil fuel export terminals in the Gulf of Mexico, already and for too long a sacrifice zone to pollution and fossil-fueled white supremacy. One of these projects is the Sea Port Oil Terminal (SPOT) proposed by notorious oil giants Enterprise & Enbridge off the Brazoria County, Texas, coast. If approved, SPOT could be the first offshore oil terminal able to load fossil fuel supertankers.

We have to do everything we can to stop SPOT now. Can you submit a comment with us and the Build Back Fossil Free Coalition telling President Biden’s Coast Guard and Department of transportation to reject the project? Submit a comment Now!

SPOT would include a massive crude oil storage facility, onshore and offshore pipelines, and an oil export terminal. The project would move 85,000 barrels of oil an hour or 2 million a day to load onto Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs), the largest ships on earth. 

Thanks to the organizing efforts of local residents the US Maritime Administration and US Coast Guard have released a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) to evaluate the environmental impacts and address concerns that this is too much pollution for one place. But the SEIS ignores climate impacts, discounts the cumulative impacts of putting one polluting facility next to another, and disregards local communities who are saying clearly that they dont want any more pollution or fossil fuels.

SPOT would be just 7 miles from another proposed oil export terminal – Texas Gulflink. If approved, SPOT would load 2 million barrels/day of oil onto massive VLCCs, & SPOT and Texas Gulflink would move more crude oil annually than is currently produced offshore of the whole Gulf Coast. The drive to export oil has grown significantly since the Crude Oil ban was lifted in 2015 and one of the biggest shale deposits on Earth was discovered in the Permian Basin.

These exports projects would increase drilling and fracking across the region, already the largest carbon bomb on the planet, and drive up prices for consumers here at home. Oil companies are racing to be the first to profit from foreign demand for fossil fuel, and the international fossil fuel profiteers are rapidly building refineries. Meanwhile, our communities and climate bear the costs.

We can stop SPOT, together. Click here to submit a comment to the US Coast Guard, Department of Transportation, and President Biden demanding that he stop approving new polluting refineries and export terminals in the already over-polluted Gulf South.