Cleaning Up Oil Refineries

Fighting Global Warming Pollution from Refineries

BPWhitingRefinerySix oil refinery expansions have recently been proposed across the Midwest over due in large part to the newly commercially viable tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Canadian crude comes from Alberta tar sands.  The tar sands are processed at the site where they are extracted; they are washed and filtered to remove the crude from the sand and then the resulting extra heavy crude is transported to refineries where it is refined.  Once refined, it results in diesel, gasoline, jet fuel, kerosene, and other products.

ELPC’s Current Initiatives

The potential increase in global warming from oil refinery expansion is enormous.  ELPC’s efforts on this initiative include:

  • Representation by ELPC attorneys of Indiana environmental groups who are challenging the air pollution permits on the BP refinery in Northwest Indiana, which are in violation of the Clean Air Act. To protect public health, ELPC is arguing that state-of-the-art pollution controls and advanced environmental technologies must be installed at the outset to achieve no net increase in air pollution and full carbon dioxide mitigation.
  • Monitoring of the proposed new oil refinery in Hyperion, SD, which would add 19 million tons of pollution to the state—the equivalent of 4-6 new coal-fired power plants.

Recent Highlights

  • In response to a petition from ELPC and other environmental groups, US EPA issued an objection to the operating permit for BP North America’s refinery in Whiting, IN in October 2009. The permit will need to be revised to accurately account for the large increases in dangerous air pollution caused by BP’s expansion of the refinery.
  • In 2007, ELPC helped achieve a very significant and highly visible victory by successfully challenging BP’s proposal to increase its water pollution into Lake Michigan as a result of its oil refinery expansion.

News

BP’s Gulf Spill Heightens Concerns Over Whiting Refinery

ELPC worked with a coalition of environmental and citizen groups to successfully challenge the air permit for an expansion of BP’s Whiting, Indiana oil refinery that would enable the facility to process more oil from Canadian tar sands, and create huge amounts of new global warming pollution in the process. An article in Greenwire and The New York Times looks at how BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico might affect the planned refinery expansion.

“Putting economics above public safety and the environment appears to be a pervasive practice” at BP, said ELPC senior attorney Faith Bugel. “If there’s a loophole, the practice appears to be to find their way through it. Our concern is that what happened in the Gulf doesn’t happen here.”

Read the full article in the New York Times