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.
[BenIndy Contributor Nathalie Christian – Texas-based Valero raked in about $11.5B of profit in 2022 — and that’s pure profit. While this fine represents progress, it also represents less than 1 hour of Valero’s 2022 profits. That’s right — in 2022, Valero made more than $1M just in profit per hour, 24 hours a day, for 365 days (Valero doesn’t stop profiting just because it’s a holiday or weekend). It’s clear Valero treats fines like these as fees; they represent just another minor cost of doing business in Benicia. Examples of fines from recent years: Valero Benicia Refinery was fined $266,000 in 2018, $122,500 in 2016 and $183,000 in 2014. It is rare for fines like these to actually financially benefit Benicia. The full text of the EPA News Release is available below this article from the Chronicle.– N.C.]
U.S. EPA hits Valero’s oil refinery in Benicia with $1.2 million penalty for two toxic flaring incidents
Incidents at the Valero refinery in Benicia in 2017 and 2019 forced people to shelter in place because of the risk of exposure to harmful chemicals, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (Samantha Laurey/The Chronicle 2022)
Oil refining giant Valero must pay a $1.2 million penalty for major flaring incidents at its Benicia facility that spewed dark plumes of pollutants into neighborhoods, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday.
The “significant chemical incidents” occurred in 2017 and 2019 and forced people, including schoolchildren, to shelter in place because of the risk of exposure to harmful chemicals, according to the agency.
Following a federal investigation, Valero executives agreed to make specific changes to their Benicia operations and pay a penalty totaling $1,224,550 in a settlement reached with the EPA. Martha Guzman, regional administrator for the EPA in California, Nevada and New Mexico, said the changes will help protect Valero workers, Benicia residents and the environment.
The EPA’s announcement is the latest investigation into problems at the Bay Area’s oil refineries. Earlier this year, health officials in Contra Costa County warned people living near the Martinez Refinery run by PBF Energy to avoid eating foods grown in surrounding neighborhoods, four months after the facility sent 20 tons of dust into the community that coated cars, homes and backyards in a mysterious fine white powder.
Last year, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District announced it had found Valero had been releasing unlawful and potentially harmful amounts of hydrocarbons from its hydrogen stacks — undetected — from 2003 to 2019. Valero said it also hadn’t detected the releases and took steps to end them.
On Wednesday, Valero didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment about the federal fines.
Benicia Mayor Steve Young said the city wasn’t notified by the EPA about its investigation or the findings. The city has been pushing for greater transparency from oil refineries and the agencies that oversee them, especially after finding out last year that local air-quality regulators failed to tell the community about harmful releases until three years after the problems were discovered.
“We have concerns that we’re being left in the dark and only find out well after the fact,” Young said.
Oil refineries sometimes burn off flammable gases through tall stacks to keep careful equilibrium within pipes and other equipment and avoid disasters like explosions. But flaring is a highly regulated activity meant to be used sparingly because of the risks those burned gases and other pollutants pose to people nearby.
One major pollutant generated by these flares is sulfur dioxide, which can harm human respiratory tracts, exacerbating problems like asthma, and worsen pollution from particulate matter and acid rain.
On May 5, 2017, Valero stacks began shooting flames and churning out dark plumes of pollutants when the facility unexpectedly lost power. The emissions coated cars in an oily substance and sent employees at a nearby musical instrument factory to the emergency room, according to the EPA. More than 1,000 people were evacuated, including staff and students at both Robert Semple and Matthew Turner elementary schools. Ultimately, more than 10,000 pounds of flammable materials and 74,420 pounds of sulfur dioxide were released from the facility, according to the EPA.
Valero reported the flaring caused more than $10 million in damage to its facility, according to EPA records. The company later sued Pacific Gas and Electric Co. for the outage.
Then on March 11, 2019, another flaring incident led Solano County health officials to warn residents with respiratory issues to stay indoors. Some businesses sheltered in place. An investigation revealed more than 15,000 pounds of sulfur dioxide were released.
The EPA inspected the facility following both incidents and in 2019 found “several” cases where the company was violating the law.
“Valero failed to immediately report releases of hazardous substances, update certain process safety information, adequately analyze certain process hazards, and develop and implement certain written operating procedures,” the EPA said.
The agency found the company had violated the federal Clean Air Act’s regulations for preventing chemical accidents.
Valero is based in San Antonio and operates 15 petroleum facilities in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
In a press release, Larry Starfield, with the EPA’s enforcement division, said the settlement “sends a clear message that EPA will prosecute companies that fail to expend the resources needed to have a compliant, well-functioning Risk Management Plan to the fullest extent of the law.”
SAN FRANCISCO (April 5, 2023) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a settlement with Valero Refining-California to resolve violations of the Clean Air Act’s Chemical Accident Prevention regulations at their Benicia Refinery. The company will pay a $1,224,550 penalty and make changes to improve process safety at the refinery.
“This settlement sends a clear message that EPA will prosecute companies that fail to expend the resources needed to have a compliant, well-functioning Risk Management Plan to the fullest extent of the law,” said Acting Assistant Administrator Larry Starfield for EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.
“Failure to properly manage hazardous materials can pose serious risks to our California communities,” said Martha Guzman, Regional Administrator of EPA Region 9. “This settlement will help protect Valero workers, the Benicia community, and the environment more broadly.”
After significant chemical incidents at the Benicia Refinery in 2017 and 2019, a 2019 EPA inspection at the facility identified several areas of noncompliance, including that Valero failed to immediately report releases of hazardous substances, update certain process safety information, adequately analyze certain process hazards, and develop and implement certain written operating procedures.
Under the terms of the settlement, Valero has agreed to make significant chemical safety improvements at the Benicia Refinery. The company has already made several of these changes, related to chemical safety, in response to EPA’s inspection. These improvements include updating and modifying process hazard analyses, modifying operating procedures, modifying reporting policies, and improving employee training. The settlement also requires Valero to modify several pressure-relief valves and update process hazard analyses to consider hazards of power loss at the facility. As part of the settlement, Valero will continue to implement safety improvements through June 2025.
The Benicia Refinery is one of thousands of facilities nationwide that make, use, and store extremely hazardous substances. Reducing the risk of accidental releases at industrial and chemical facilities like the Benicia Refinery is one of EPA’s National Enforcement and Compliance Initiatives. Catastrophic accidents at these facilities can result in death or serious injuries; impacts to the community, including orders to evacuate or shelter-in-place; and other harm to human health and the environment. The Clean Air Act requires that industrial and chemical facilities that store large amounts of hazardous substances develop and implement a Risk Management Plan to reduce the risk of accidental releases.
For more information on the Clean Air Act’s Risk Management Plan Program, please visit EPA’s Risk Management Program (RMP) Rule webpage.
For more information on reporting possible violations of environmental laws and regulations visit EPA’s enforcement reporting website.
The oil and gas industry are split on the rollback
This 2017 photo shows pumpjacks operating in the western edge of California’s Central Valley northwest of Bakersfield. (Brian Melley/AP)The Washington Post, By Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, Aug 29, 2019
The Environmental Protection Agency announced Thursday that it plans to loosen federal rules on methane, a powerful greenhouse gas linked to climate change.
The proposed rule would reverse standards enacted under President Barack Obama that required oil and gas operators to prevent the release of methane in new drilling wells, pipelines and storage facilities.
It also challenges the notion that the federal government has the authority to regulate methane without first making a detailed determination that it qualifies as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
If successful, that change could hamper the ability of future administrations to enact tougher restrictions on methane. Already, the Trump administration has taken several steps to limit the government’s ability to regulate other greenhouse gases in the future, including in a recently finalized rule curbing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
“EPA’s proposal delivers on President Trump’s executive order and removes unnecessary and duplicative regulatory burdens from the oil and gas industry,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement. “The Trump administration recognizes that methane is valuable, and the industry has an incentive to minimize leaks and maximize its use.”
Methane is a significant contributor to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, though it is shorter-lived than carbon dioxide and is not emitted in amounts as large. It often is leaked as companies drill for gas and transport it across the country, and methane emissions are more than 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide emissions over the short term.
Scientists have projected that the world needs to cut its overall greenhouse gas emissions nearly in half by mid-century to avert catastrophic effects from global warming.
According to the EPA, methane accounted for more than 10 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from human activities as recently as 2017. Nearly a third of those emissions were generated by the natural gas and petroleum industry.
“What they’re tackling is whether methane can lawfully be a regulatory pollutant,” Erik Milito, vice president of upstream and industry operations for the American Petroleum Institute, said in an interview. “We have a strong consensus that federal agencies need to follow the letter of the law. They did not do that, and they are going back and correcting that.”
Anne Idsal, assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, said the administration is confident that methane emissions from oil and gas companies will continue to decline over time, even without the current regulations.
“Methane is a valuable resource,” Idsal told reporters in a call Thursday. “There’s every incentive for industry to minimize any type of fugitive methane emissions, capture it, use it and sell it down the road.”
The agency estimates that the proposed changes, which will be subject to public comment for 60 days after they are published, would save the oil and natural gas industry $17 million to $19 million a year.
But several of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies, including Exxon, Shell and BP, have opposed the rollback and urged the Trump administration to keep the current standards in place. Collectively, these firms account for 11 percent of America’s natural gas output.
In a statement Thursday, Shell U.S. President Gretchen Watkins reiterated the company’s support for national limits on methane, noting that Shell has pledged to reduce its methane leaks from its global operations to less than 0.2 percent by 2025.
“We believe sound environmental policies are foundational to the vital role natural gas can play in the energy transition and have made clear our support of 2016 law to regulate methane from new and modified onshore sources,” she said. “Despite the administration’s proposal to no longer regulate methane, Shell’s U.S. assets will continue to contribute to that global target.”
The Wall Street Journal first reported news of the rollback.
Idsal said the agency will continue regulating volatile organic compounds, which are also released during oil and gas operations, rather than methane directly. Such limits could cut down on the amount of methane released in the process. Milito noted that by 2023, 90 percent of oil and gas facilities will have to install technology curbing volatile organic compounds.
In September, the Interior Department eased requirements that oil and gas firms operating on federal and tribal land capture the release of methane.
Environmentalists threatened to fight the Trump administration’s move in court.
Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group, called the proposal reckless, saying it shows “complete contempt for our climate.” She said that even the Obama administration’s efforts to limit methane emissions were modest, given the significant amount that escapes into the atmosphere each year.
“The Obama rule was like a Band-Aid on a gaping wound,” Siegel said. “The Trump administration is so fanatical that they couldn’t even live with the Band-Aid. They had to rip off the Band-Aid.”
The Obama administration’s push to impose the first limits on methane emissions from the oil and gas industry in 2016 came shortly after the EPA found that emissions were on an upswing at a time when booming U.S. shale oil and gas drilling had dramatically driven down the prices of domestic natural gas and global oil alike.
Ben Ratner, a senior director at the advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund, said in an interview that rolling back the regulations could reward bad actors in the industry. Given that many major players had embraced limits on methane, Ratner said, it made little sense for Trump officials to ease such restrictions.
“It’s more of an ideological reaction to regulation of any climate pollutant by the federal government,” he said.
Why California gets to write its own auto emissions standards: 5 questions answered
Authored by Nicholas Bryner and Meredith Hankins, Posted on April 6, 2018 10:02 am by Nick Bryner
Rush hour on the Hollywood Freeway, Los Angeles, September 9, 2016. AP Photo/Richard Vogel
Legal Planet editor’s note: On April 2, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt announced that the Trump administration plans to revise tailpipe emissions standards negotiated by the Obama administration for motor vehicles built between 2022 and 2025, saying the standards were set “too high.” Pruitt also said the EPA was re-examining California’s historic ability to adopt standards that are more ambitious than the federal government’s. Legal scholars Nicholas Bryner and Meredith Hankins explain why California has this authority – and what may happen if the EPA tries to curb it.
Where does California get this special authority?
The Clean Air Act empowers the EPA to regulate air pollution from motor vehicles. To promote uniformity, the law generally bars states from regulating car emissions.
But when the Clean Air Act was passed, California was already developing innovative laws and standards to address its unique air pollution problems. So Congress carved out an exemption. As long as California’s standards protect public health and welfare at least as strictly as federal law, and are necessary “to meet compelling and extraordinary conditions,” the law requires the EPA to grant California a waiver so it can continue to apply its own regulations. California has received numerous waivers as it has worked to reduce vehicle emissions by enacting ever more stringent standards since the 1960s.
Other states can’t set their own standards, but they can opt to follow California’s motor vehicle emission regulations. Currently, 12 states and the District of Columbia have adopted California’s standards.
Gov. Ronald Reagan signs legislation establishing the California Air Resources Board to address the state’s air pollution, August 30, 1967. CA ARB
What are the “compelling and extraordinary conditions” that California’s regulations are designed to address?
In the 1950s scientists recognized that the unique combination of enclosed topography, a rapidly growing population and a warm climate in the Los Angeles air basin was a recipe for dangerous smog. Dutch chemist Arie Jan Haagen-Smit discovered in 1952 that worsening Los Angeles smog episodes were caused by photochemical reactions between California’s sunshine and nitrogen oxides and unburned hydrocarbons in motor vehicle exhaust.
California’s Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board issued regulations mandating use of the nation’s first vehicle emissions control technology in 1961, and developed the nation’s first vehicle emissions standards in 1966. Two years later the EPA adopted standards identical to California’s for model year 1968 cars. UCLA Law scholar Ann Carlson calls this pattern, in which California innovates and federal regulators piggyback on the state’s demonstrated success, “iterative federalism.” This process has continued for decades.
California’s severe air pollution problems have made it a pioneer in air quality research.
California has set ambitious goals for slowing climate change. Is that part of this dispute with the EPA?
Yes. Transportation is now the largest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States. The tailpipe standards that the Obama EPA put in place were designed to limit GHG emissions from cars by improving average fuel efficiency.
These standards were developed jointly by the EPA, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), and California, which have overlapping legal authority to regulate cars. EPA and California have the responsibility to control motor vehicle emissions of air pollutants, including GHGs. DOT is in charge of regulating fuel economy.
Congress began regulating fuel economy in response to the oil crisis in the 1970s. DOT sets the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard that each auto manufacturer must meet. Under this program, average fuel economy in the United States improved in the late 1970s but stagnated from the 1980s to the early 2000s as customers shifted to purchasing larger vehicles, including SUVs, minivans and trucks.
In 2007 Congress responded with a new law that required DOT to set a standard of at least 35 miles per gallon by 2020, and the “maximum feasible average fuel economy” after that. That same year, the Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Air Act authorized the EPA to regulate GHG emissions from cars.
The Obama administration’s tailpipe standard brought these overlapping mandates together. EPA’s regulation sets how much carbon dioxide can be emitted per mile, which matches with DOT’s increased standard for average fuel economy. It also includes a “midterm review” to assess progress. Administrator Scott Pruitt’s new EPA review, released on April 2, overturned the Obama administration’s midterm review and concluded that the 2022 to 2025 standard was not feasible.
The EPA now argues that earlier assumptions behind the rule were “optimistic” and can’t be met. However, its review almost entirely ignored the purpose of the standards and the costs of continuing to emit GHGs at high levels. Although the document is 38 pages long, the word “climate” never appears, and “carbon” appears only once.
The EPA’s decision does not yet have any legal impact. It leaves the current standards in place until the EPA and DOT decide on a less-stringent replacement.
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from transportation exceeded those from electric power generation in 2016 for the first time since the 1970s. USEIA
Can the Trump administration take away California’s authority to set stricter targets?
The EPA has never attempted to revoke an existing waiver. In 2007, under George W. Bush, the agency denied California’s request for a waiver to regulate motor vehicle GHG emissions. California sued, but the EPA reversed course under President Obama and granted the state a waiver before the case was resolved.
California’s current waiver was approved in 2013 as a part of a “grand bargain” between California, federal agencies and automakers. It covers the state’s Advanced Clean Cars program and includes standards to reduce conventional air pollutants like carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, as well as the GHG standards jointly developed with the EPA and DOT.
The Trump administration is threatening to revoke this waiver when it decouples the national GHG vehicle standards from California’s standards. EPA Administrator Pruitt has said that the agency is re-examining the waiver, and that “cooperative federalism doesn’t mean that one state can dictate standards for the rest of the country.” In our view, this statement mischaracterizes how the Clean Air Act works. Other states have voluntarily chosen to follow California’s rules because they see benefits in reducing air pollution.
The Trump Administration’s assault on clean car standards risks our ability to protect our children’s health, tackle climate change, and save hardworking Americans money. We’re ready to file suit if needed to protect these critical standards: https://t.co/AqwDR9Js18https://t.co/qBalA25Z2l
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