October 1, 2026 - California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill Wednesday night that will make it harder for President Donald Trump to build a coal terminal in San Francisco’s backyard, as part of the president’s $700 million plan to expand global coal trade.

The new law comes after Trump announced a multimillion-dollar investment in the coal industry this summer, including $75 million for a new terminal to store and ship coal from Oakland. It will require any new coal project or existing projects with plans to export more than 5 million tons of coal per year to be subject to the California Environmental Quality Act, otherwise known as CEQA.

Newsom’s signing is a win for environmental advocates who have fought the Oakland proposal for nearly a decade.

The proposed West Gateway Terminal Project would be the largest coal export site on the West Coast. The new law attempts to use California’s infamous environmental review process — known and despised by many for its bureaucratic and sluggish process — to put a wrench in Trump’s plans.

The site is at the Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal, a former military base, and has been proposed by developer Phil Tagami, who first entered an agreement with Oakland in 2012, according to Politico, to redevelop the empty site. At the time, Tagami proposed the unused site could be used to ship goods from the terminal. Politico reported that Tagami originally said the facility would not transport coal.

In 2015, a small newspaper in Utah broke the news that his company, named the California Capital & Investment Group, was planning to ship millions of tons of coal from Utah. That news sparked outrage in Oakland, and in 2016, the City Council banned the storage and handling of coal, which resulted in a yearslong legal saga between Tagami and the city. The project stalled for years until 2025 when a court decided the developer could proceed. Tagami did not respond to SFGATE’s request for comment.

In June, Trump allocated $75 million to the planned Oakland project, out of a $700 million total nationwide investment plan to revitalize the American coal industry and bring trade to Asia. That pool of federal money would only subsidize the cost of the project, and not cover the entirety, which is projected to be upward of $230 million, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. 

If Tagami gets his project built, it would function as a mine-to-market pathway for inland coal-producing states like Utah and Wyoming, which would collectively ship 13 million tons of coal per year to store in Oakland and later ship across seas to Japan, Taiwan and Malaysia, according to a new report.

The Oakland facility is part of Trump’s goal of revitalizing the coal industry. The president has announced plans to allocate the money to improve over a dozen existing coal plants; build new facilities in Alaska, Maryland and West Virginia for the first time in over a decade; and open the East Bay coal terminal, which Trump said would create more than 1,400 jobs. 

Assembly Bill 40, authored by East Bay Democrat Assemblymember Mia Bonta, is an attempt to squash Trump’s investment. The law will impose new environmental hurdles for the project, a tactic that Bonta said in a news release would effectively be saying “no to coal” by requiring the developer to fully disclose the environmental impacts of the project and mitigate those harms. 

Under the new California law, that project would have to undergo a rigorous and time-consuming environmental impact report in order to be greenlit. 

A new report released this week, commissioned by potential investors in the plant, found that the coal terminal could be much more harmful to the environment than originally thought. The report said the Oakland terminal would store coal in open-air piles, instead of the previously promised fully enclosed facilities. Opponents of the project told the Los Angeles Times that the new findings are a “shocker” because East Bay’s winds could spread coal debris across the city.

The coal is also expected to be dustier because it will use coal from Wyoming and Montana and not strictly Utah.

The law could impact other proposed facilities. There are already three coal terminals in California, and the industry has expressed a need for more to be built.

The Levin-Richmond terminal, just north of Oakland, has agreed to stop activity at the end of this year. The other coal terminals are in Long Beach and Stockton.

In July, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a report that called the proposed Oakland facility “part of the solution” to unlocking “the full potential of U.S. western coal exports,” but also called for more infrastructure to be built.

The report advised policymakers in coal-friendly states to come up with ways to “overcome politically motivated resistance” to coal facilities.