Ranking Refineries

What Do We Know About Oil Refinery Pollution From Right-to-Know Data?

Posted: 01-Nov-1995; Updated: 20-Jun-2003

By Lois N. Epstein, Stephen Greetham, Anna Karuba
Environmental Defense Fund

Originally published November 1995

Executive Summary

Oil refineries, like many types of industrial facilities, use and release toxic chemicals that can harm human health and the environment. The carcinogen benzene, for example, is both contained in crude oil and created by refineries. An average-sized refinery releases over 10,000 gallons of oily waste daily to air, water, and land.

Manufacturers above a threshold size must report their multi-media (air, water, and land) toxic chemical wastes to the federal and state governments under the federal right-to-know law. Although oil refineries represent less than 1% of all the facilities that submit these reports, they account for over 10% of the total wastes created.

This study analyzes oil refinery right-to-know reports for 1992. Its purposes are:

• to develop simplified rankings of individual refineries and states with refineries;
• to assess the value of the facility throughput data (i.e., inputs as well as outputs) from New Jersey, and the federal and New Jersey data on source reduction; and
• to recommend actions by government, industry, researchers, and the public that will improve the quality of right-to-know data.

We utilized three refinery efficiency measures to develop simplified refinery rankings, each a quantity of waste divided by a refinery's capacity in barrels (one barrel equals 42 gallons) per day. These measures enable us to compare refineries of different sizes. Two measures utilize the full list of toxic chemicals reported by refineries divided by capacity, and one measure uses a single chemical, benzene, divided by capacity. Although any one of these measures would be inadequate to make comparisons and rankings among refineries, the three taken together are reasonably reliable. The higher the values yielded by these measures, the greater the pollution and the more inefficient the facility.

We analyzed 166 refineries and sorted these from least to most efficient in Tables 3.6-3.8. In Table ES-1, we list the most inefficient refineries, which are those creating the most pollution per barrel refined. Among the most inefficient refineries are both large and small facilities, and refineries located in Clean Air Act ozone "attainment" and "non-attainment" areas, the latter having stricter regulations to prevent releases.

Table ES-2 lists the most efficient refineries. This table should be used with caution, however, because the data for many of these facilities are significantly less reliable than for the majority of the data pool using both objective and subjective measures.

Turning to the 34 states with refineries, we rank them by aggregating each state's total release and offsite waste transfer data, and give the results in Table 3.10. The disparity in performance for states with two or more refineries is very large, nearly one order of magnitude. This indicates that states vary greatly in their regulatory and enforcement efforts to reduce multi-media waste releases and offsite waste transfers for refineries; as a result, there is a greater than ten-fold difference among states in pollution created per barrel refined. The states with the poorest performance are, in order, West Virginia, Kansas, Texas, and Mississippi. At the other end of the range, New Jersey (with its more extensive right-to-know reporting requirements) ranks among the best states in performance.

Our analyses result in 23 recommendations covering ways the government can improve right-to-know data, ways the refining industry can better meet governmental requirements and enhance its relationship with the public, and potential follow-up actions to this study. The key recommendations are:

• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should implement the "Key Identifiers Rule" as soon as possible to minimize confusion about what types of facilities should report under the federal right-to-know law;
• EPA should modify federal right-to-know requirements so that more extensive data on persistent toxic chemicals are reported;
• States and EPA should require facilities to report throughput data to help verify right-to-know data quali- ty. Without facility throughput data, it is impossible to know how accurate right-to-know data are;
• EPA should require facilities to report actual quantities of waste eliminated by source reduction activities to help verify right-to-know data quality;
• Congress should maintain minimum requirements that state environmental programs must meet to avoid creation of "pollution haven" states;
• Industry should develop a guide to right-to-know reporting for refineries;
• Researchers should investigate why states differ so much in performance; and
• The public should examine how refineries and states compare and advocate improvements for weaker facilities and states.

Title: "Ranking Refineries: What Do We Know About Oil Refinery Pollution From Right-to-Know Data?"
Price: $10 (Also available: Separate volume of appendices, $25.)
Publication Code: N/A

See also:

• EDF Ranks Refineries, States By Their Reported Pollution (News brief)
• West Virginia, Kansas, Texas Lead U.S. In Worst Refinery Performance (Press release)