Refineries Oil refineries turn oil into an assortment of more than 2,500 commercial petroleum products. The refining process involves everything from boiling and filtering to solvents and additives to turn crude oil into products from gasoline and diesel to jet fuel and asphalt for paving roads. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, there are 149 petroleum refineries in the United States operating in 33 states, and over 700 operating worldwide. An average-sized facility refines around four million gallons of crude oil every day. In the process, refineries release more than 11,000 gallons of oil into our air, water and groundwater each day. That figure doesn’t account for oil spilled accidentally or chemical byproduct pollution such as benzene and naphthalene, acid rain-producing sulfur dioxide or smog-forming particulates. Nor does it consider thermal pollution — the discharge of warm effluent into surrounding waterways — which threatens fish and aquatic ecosystems. In the 2002 study Oil: A Life Cycle Analysis of its Health and Environmental Impacts, Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment noted that the refining and transportation of oil account for “46 percent of the estimated 3.2 million tons of oil entering the oceans each year.” Refinery pollution doesn’t just impact the environment. It poses serious threats to human health, affecting the young and the elderly most severely. The same Harvard Medical School study chronicles the myriad health impacts of oil refinery pollution, particularly afflicting those living closest to these facilities — respiratory problems such as asthma and bronchitis, headaches, birth defects, leukemia and various cancers. Incidence of childhood leukemia and other cancers in children under 15 years of age have been correlated in several studies with living in proximity to oil refineries, and a recent study conducted in Taiwan noted a significant risk for leukemia in 20 to 29 year olds living near these facilities. The risks aren’t just from chronic exposure either. Accidents, fires and leaks are common at refineries and exacerbate local health effects in adjacent ‘fence-line’ communities. I witnessed one of these incidents first hand in 2001 while visiting the Diamond neighborhood in Norco, Louisiana (Norco being an acronym for the original operator, the New Orleans Refining Company which transformed the former cane plantation into an industrial site). Diamond, a small African American community literally sandwiched between a Shell chemical plant (25 feet from houses) and an oil refinery (12 feet from the nearest house), had sky-high rates of childhood asthma, cancers and developmental disorders. As I stood watching wheezing kids attempting to play basketball, a Shell employee ambled over to our gathering — a birthday celebration for Diamond’s eldest resident — to inform us that the refinery was having a flaring incident but not to worry, this was ‘routine.’ I turned to see the flaring stacks, just a few hundred feet beyond the hoops court, spewing colorful flames and smoke into the air. Maybe the scratch in my throat wasn’t from the delicious Creole food after all. We found out later the ‘routine’ incident had in fact been Shell’s worst 24-hour flaring period that year. The Diamond neighborhood has since been largely bulldozed, the residents having fled through a bittersweet Shell relocation program which community heroes fought to secure, despite hopes that they would be able to preserve their tight-knit community. (Many of the residents descended from the plantation workers who staged America’s largest slave rebellion in 1811 just yards away from Diamond.) It’s hard to say who won that fight, those from the community who can now begin to heal their polluted bodies, or the company which continues polluting, and now doesn’t have anybody to watchdog its operations from the fence line. Perhaps the most embarrassing, pathetic reality is that the majority of toxic pollution belching from refineries isn’t coming out the top of the stacks, but rather through leaky pipes, bum seals, faulty valves and gaskets. These ironically-named “fugitive emissions” persist despite readily available, relatively low-cost remedies. The refineries could upgrade the equipment to cleaner technologies, which have been available for decades. But they choose not to. |