Earlier this month, a Contra Costa County Superior Court ordered the oil company, Phillips 66 to put on hold its Rodeo refinery’s transition from processing crude oil to producing biofuels, until the county had addressed major environmental flaws in its environmental analysis of the project. The court ruling was in response to one of two lawsuits filed by environmental groups in 2022, challenging Contra Costa County’s approval of two proposed biofuel refinery conversions — the Phillips 66 one in Rodeo that would produce more than a billion gallons per year of biofuel products, making it one of the largest biofuel refineries in the world, and the Marathon-Tesoro refinery in nearby Martinez that could eventually produce more than 700,000 gallons per year of biofuel products.

To understand what lies ahead in the legal battle against these two projects, as well at the local and global implications of California’s push toward biofuels, Earth Island Journal editor and Terra Verde host Maureen Nandini Mitra talks with Shana Lazerow, legal director of Communities for a Better Environment, which, along with the Center for Biological Diversity, is suing the county over the two projects, Ben Clark a student attorney from the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic, which is representing the litigants in court, and Stephanie Safdi, a supervising attorney and lecturer at the law clinic.

NOTE: The revised EIR for the Phillips 66 Rodeo Renewed Project is currently open for public comment.

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