Martinez refinery fined $27.5 million for Clean Air Act violations

U.S. EPA fines Tesoro $27.5 million for violations at Martinez refinery

San Francisco Chronicle, by Joel Umanzor, April 27, 2023

Tesoro Refinery in Martinez
The Tesoro refinery stands in Martinez, California, U.S., on Monday, Feb. 2, 2015 | David Paul Morris/Bloomberg.

 

Tesoro Refining and Marketing Company, which operates a petroleum refinery in Martinez, will pay a $27.5 million penalty for violating a 2016 consent decree ordering the company to reduce air pollutants, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The company, according to Thursday’s settlement, failed to limit nitrous oxide emissions from July 2018 to May 2020, when authorities said the refinery suspended operations.

Shortly before shutting down refinery operations, Marathon Petroleum Corporation acquired Tesoro’s parent corporation and announced plans to convert the refinery from producing fuels from crude oil to renewable sources such as vegetable oil, according to the EPA.

Prior to the refinery’s operations suspension, the EPA said, Tesoro would produce approximately 161,000 barrels per day and was the fourth largest petroleum refinery in California.

Thursday’s agreement does not prohibit Tesoro from resuming petroleum refining but requires the company to install “specific air pollution control technology” to ensure nitrous oxide limits are met, according to the EPA.

As a result of mitigation, Tesoro has agreed to give up almost all of its nitrous oxide emission trading credits, according to authorities. Companies can receive these credits when they shut down certain equipment and may use the credits to offset emissions from other projects or in trades with other companies

The agreement will modify the 2016 decree while including new requirements that will apply to Tesoro if they choose to reopen the Martinez refinery as a petroleum refinery or renewable fuels plant, according to the EPA.

Reach Joel Umanzor: joel.umanzor@sfchronicle.com


SEE ALSO:

The Green Revolution Will Not Be Painless

A California oil refinery shut down during the pandemic. A year later, former employees were not all right.
Mario Tama / Getty

The Atlantic, By Annie Lowrey, April 26, 2023

In 2006, James Feldermann got hired as a trainee at a refinery in Martinez, California, in the Bay Area. It was hard work, with 12-hour-minimum shifts, but Feldermann came to excel at it. He learned how to isolate pipes and vessels, load railcars with molten sulfur and ammonia, and helm an industrial control panel. In time, he rose to the position of head operator at the Marathon Petroleum site. The job paid well, and he enjoyed it. He expected to stay until retirement.

On a Friday afternoon in July 2020, Feldermann was abruptly summoned to an all-hands Zoom meeting. While some of his colleagues struggled to get the audio to work, Feldermann received a phone call from his union representative. “I didn’t actually hear management tell us that they were laying us off,” he told me. The plant was being shut down, as the rise of work-from-home and the spread of electric vehicles depressed Californians’ demand for gasoline. Feldermann and his co-workers would be out of a job in 90 days.

The United States is embarking on an epochal transition from fossil fuels to green energy. That shift is necessary to avert the worst outcomes of climate change. It also stands to put hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people like Feldermann out of work. The result could be not only economic pain for individual families, but also the devastation of communities that rely on fossil-fuel extraction and a powerful political backlash against green-energy policies.

A pathbreaking new study [BenIndy editor: see indent below] shows just how real the damage could be, absent policies to soften the economic blow. Virginia Parks, a professor at UC Irvine, and Ian Baran, a doctoral student, tracked the consequences of the Marathon shutdown in near-real time, getting more than 40 percent of the workers to return surveys and a smaller group to sit for interviews. They found that, more than a year after the shutdown, one in five Marathon workers was unemployed. Their earnings had declined sharply, with the median hourly wage of employed workers plunging from $50 to $38. Some workers were earning as little as $14 an hour. And those new gigs came with more dangerous working conditions.

[Editor >> See the UC Berkeley Labor Center’s executive summary: Fossil fuel layoff: The economic and employment effects of a refinery closure on workers in the Bay Area. Also, download the 39-page report, Fossil Fuel Layoff, here.]

To prevent other workers from experiencing the same, the Biden White House has promised to pursue a “just transition,” employing policies to ensure “new, good-paying jobs for American workers and health and economic benefits for communities.” But the green-energy transition is already underway. And it is not clear that it will be just.

The legendary American union leader Tony Mazzocchi pioneered the concept of a just transition a half century ago. Some industries are too toxic for society, he argued. But to shut them down in a way that punishes the workers in those industries, or the places where those industries are concentrated, would be unjust.

Just-transition policies are not merely about bailing out blue-collar folks. They are meant to defray the cost of having whole communities fall into persistent economic distress: a loss of social cohesion, people living shorter and sicker lives, the rise of “deaths of despair,” the growth of right-wing populism. They are also meant to generate political support for green policies, or at least dampen any backlash. Without them, “you risk dissuading future efforts that are for the societal good,” J. Mijin Cha, an environmental-studies professor at UC Santa Cruz, told me. “If we’re doing things that are for the benefit of society but screw over a bunch of people, that’s not a societal good.”

These policies have worked. The Ruhr region in western Germany, for example, once produced coal, iron, and steel, with extractive and heavy industry employing a majority of the region’s workers. The German government, labor unions, and industrial leaders came to a series of agreements to diversify its economy, providing payments for displaced workers and making investments in service-and-knowledge businesses. Employment in coal mining in the region went from 473,000 in 1957 to zero by the end of 2018. The area lost nearly 1 million production jobs but gained nearly 1 million service jobs.

Yet it is hard to identify many, if any, just transitions in the United States. Appalachia lost its coal jobs and gained an opioid epidemic. Detroit deindustrialized and fell into poverty and disrepair. The decision to open up trade with China sent millions of American manufacturing jobs overseas, and policy makers did little to create any in their place. Now the planned obsolescence of the fossil-fuel industry threatens to create new Rust Belts in regions economically dependent on extraction, such as the Permian Basin, in Texas, or the Bakken Formation, in Montana and North Dakota.

The problem is threefold. First, the United States does not invest heavily in industrial policy or place-based policy compared with some of its rich-country peers, though the Biden administration has started to push billions of dollars into both. If coal is leaving a region, Washington historically is not sending anything else in. Second, the country has lower rates of unionization and a much thinner safety net than other wealthy nations, making workers more vulnerable to the effects of mine closures and plant shutdowns. Third, the Republican Party tends to reject the premise that the country needs to move away from fossil-fuel production at all, making them a weak partner in setting up just-transition plans.

No wonder the Marathon shutdown went the way it did. John Bayer, a safety specialist, lost his job at the site, as did his two brothers. He told me that he was not offered any form of government help, aside from unemployment insurance. Bayer, who has two kids, sent out about 50 applications and received just two callbacks. He ended up at an agriscience firm that nearly matched his Marathon wage but provided fewer opportunities for overtime. “I ended up with a $60,000-a-year pay cut,” he told me.

James Feldermann wound up taking a job based in Reno, Nevada, for $17 an hour less than he was making at Marathon. He rented a small studio apartment there and spent months driving 200 miles back to the Bay Area every weekend to see his wife and son.

Both the state of California and the Biden administration are in the process of developing plans for a just transition to green energy. Those plans were too late for the Marathon employees. Many labor leaders, academics, and politicians think those plans are almost certain to be too little for fossil-fuel workers losing their jobs in the near future.

On paper, the challenge seems straightforward. The United States has roughly 120,000 oil-and-gas workers and 40,000 coal miners. The green-energy sector is adding at least that many jobs every year. Supply, meet demand. Why not create a job-matching service for those laid off; provide them with wage subsidies, transition assistance, and relocation funds; and watch the country’s emissions turn from smoke-gray to vapor-white?

A few reasons. For one, fossil-fuel companies employ about 1.7 million workers in the U.S., not 160,000, once you factor in all the labor not directly involved in extraction and refining. It takes a lot of workers to transport fuel, manufacture secondary products from it, and power communities with it. And it makes little sense to transition many of those workers directly into green-energy jobs. Oil-and-gas gigs tend to pay far more than solar and wind do. And workers in extractive industries tend to develop valuable, specialized skill sets, as Feldermann did. Their technical chops would be wasted selling rooftop solar systems, and their salaries would get cut in half.

The government also faces the challenge of supporting whole communities dependent on fossil-fuel extraction, not just individual workers. “Fossil-fuel companies tend to be dominant employers where they are located,” Michaël Aklin, a professor of economics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland, told me. “When they shut down, the central node in that local economy disappears.” The consequences ripple out to the businesses and institutions that rely on the money those workers used to spend and the taxes they used to pay.

The crux of the Biden administration’s plan for a just transition thus far is a policy granting tax incentives to businesses investing in “energy communities.” In the long term, that might encourage companies to locate warehouses and jobs in the places where oil, gas, and coal facilities are closing. But incentives are, well, just incentives. What if private businesses choose not to locate in certain parts of Louisiana or North Dakota, despite the tax breaks on the table? What if they create jobs years after a shutdown has done its damage? What happens to places where no business wants to invest?

At this point, neither Sacramento nor Washington has developed a robust plan to reach out and help oil-and-gas workers one by one. That’s a necessary component, UC Irvine’s Virginia Parks told me. The government, she argued, should provide financial support to cover the gap between workers’ pre- and post-layoff wages, as well as aiding workers close to retirement. Legislators should set up programs to certify the workers’ skills so that outside employers can see just how qualified they are. Finally, the government should provide retraining and job-match services.

Last week, Tracy Scott, the president of the United Steelworkers Local 5, the union representing the Marathon employees, drove me around the closed refinery complex. It sits on emerald-green marshland near where the Carquinez Strait empties into San Pablo Bay. When we visited, the heavy machinery once used to turn sour crude into gas and petrochemicals was surrounded by a superbloom of California poppies and wild mustard. We both remarked on how beautiful it was. A little later, Scott told me that refinery workers tend to die young, and rarely get to take advantage of the retirement packages the union negotiates for them.

This place does not deserve to be burdened with this refinery, I thought. And these people do not deserve to suffer for its closure.


Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Opinion: BUSD election – use disappointment as motivation

The BUSD Election, the unwinding of possibility and what keeps us going

By Ashton Lyle, April 27, 2023

Portrait of Ashton Lyle
Ashton Lyle

According to the Solano County Registrar of Voters, Ariana Martinez has lost her bid to maintain her appointment to the Benicia Unified School District Board of Trustees. As a former Benicia student, I am left with the sinking feeling that follows the unwinding of possibility. It’s hard to believe that even in this small liberal town on the Bay, there are losses. 

I am only 24 years old, but I spent almost 13 years in Benicia, from kindergarten through senior year. I remember the grassroots coalition that came together to prevent Valero’s attempt to import Crude by Rail, which could have resulted in a disaster like we just saw in East Palestine, Ohio. I participated in a march on City Hall with hundreds of Benicia students who refused to let arts funding go without a fight. I know the people of Benicia, and especially its young folks, will turn out when needed.


It’s a reminder that the political process is exhausting. We cannot win every issue on every ballot, and we will continue to feel the sharp sting of disappointment.


The hard truth behind Ariana’s loss is that we failed to pull enough of us together to protect Benicia’s future. It’s a reminder that the political process is exhausting. We cannot win every issue on every ballot, and we will continue to feel the sharp sting of disappointment.

The inevitability of failure in a democracy can wrestle hope from all of us, myself included. In my worst moments, I find the weight of what could have been driving me toward pessimism and passivity. It is the awareness of a better world slipping through our fingers that makes these encounters with political failure so tragic, especially for young people, who have the older generations’ total failure to take responsibility on climate change as their most immediate political experience. In this stalemate, it can be hard to imagine successful activism and civic engagement.

I end up asking myself again and again how I can learn to live with the feeling that our town, state, or country is not progressing but rather sliding backward. For myself, it is essentially a question of sustainability: how do we preserve our activism and even our faith when the results of politics continue to fail us?

This absurd human condition we find ourselves muddled in concerned one of my favorite writers, Albert Camus. It is one of his essays, The Myth of Sisyphus that helps provide a path forward from that valley of cynicism where I have found myself thus far. In this essay, Camus describes Sisyphus, a man undergoing horrific torture as punishment from the ancient Greek gods. Sisyphus labors endlessly, rolling a massive boulder up a hill that he will never summit. 

Sisyphus’s fate is a truly human one. However, Camus does not imagine him tormented, but happy.

Camus explains that Sisyphus smiles because the process of moving his rock gives him purpose. Sisyphus accepts he will never achieve his goal but comes to love each “struggle towards the heights” as meaningful and essentially distinct from the moment the rock inevitably slips from his grasp and rolls down into the valley. It’s a reminder that the act of striving for a better future is valuable in itself.


We must remember to find meaning in the process of democracy.


We must remember to find meaning in the process of democracy. Valuing the exercise of politics reminds us, as Camus said, that fate is in our own hands. The failures and disappointments will come all on their own, but success arrives solely by rededicating ourselves to the democratic process. Activism will not always overcome the odds, but the disappointments we feel in our town can only be seen as failures because our actions have consequences.

There is always more to be done. Our roads are falling apart, Valero releases toxins into our air — and funds into our elections — but casting our votes and making our voices heard remains essential to creating a better future for our community. Action is needed now more than ever because, to paraphrase John Lewis, democracy is an act, and it is continuously under threat by passivity in the face of those who aim only to advance themselves.


The age-old cure for feelings of helplessness and disappointment is action . . . 


If I can urge anything to the young and old of our town it is to use disappointment as motivation to get even more involved in what makes Benicia great. Volunteer or donate to a local nonprofit (such as the Kyle Hyland Foundation), send messages or call potential supporters for a politician you really believe in, and of course stay informed by reading news outlets such as the Benicia Independent. The age-old cure for feelings of helplessness and disappointment is action, and there are plenty of good causes to work for in Benicia.


[BenIndy Contributor Nathalie Christian: This post will serve as our final announcement regarding BUSD election results. I was not eligible to vote in this election, but 4,110 other Benicians were. Of them, 1,060 chose to cast ballots. That’s a voter turnout of 27%.  Compare this with the ~60% turnout for our last general election. While the results remain uncertified, Amy Hirsh is the clear winner of the vacant board seat. That said, I’m not sure there were any real winners in this special election, especially when our schools — and the students they serve — suffered most from its massive, unnecessary cost. —N.C.]

AAUW to host candidate outreach & recruitment event at Benicia Library, May 3

The Benicia-Vallejo Chapter of the American Association of University Women Presents:

Closing the Gap — For Women in Solano County

How to recruit viable candidates for winnable districts


Wednesday, May 3rd at 7:00 P.M.
Dona Benicia Room,
Benicia Public Library
(150 East L Street, Benicia)

— FREE & OPEN TO ALL —


Program

The program will describe how Close the Gap applies strategic targeting of legislative districts. The effort starts with a detailed analysis of legislative districts to determine open or winnable seats. Close the Gap develops district profiles based on demographic information, voting data and legislative priorities. Then the search starts for progressive women leaders that best fit the district.

Guest Speaker

Susannah Delano, Close the Gap California, Exec Dir

Susannah Delano joined Close the Gap CA as Executive Director in January 2018. She has worked for over 15 years to promote the good health and empowerment of women and challenged communities throughout California. She is grounded in a commitment to move the needle on issues of racial justice, gender equity, and larger inclusivity.

Close the Gap California is a statewide campaign to achieve gender balance in the California Legislature by recruiting progressive women to run. The organization recruits accomplished women in targeted districts and prepares them to launch competitive campaigns. Recruits are pro-choice, pro-public school funding and support paths out of poverty.

AAUW Flyer for Close the Gap event
Click the image to enlarge.

For more information: bvaauw@gmail.comhttps://beniciavallejo-ca.aauw.net/

AAUW does not support or oppose any political party or candidate.