© Reuters.
By Laila Kearney
RODEO, California (Reuters) – Within the oldest refining city within the American West, Phillips 66 (NYSE:) is promising a greener future because it strikes to halt crude-oil processing and construct a large renewable diesel plant, main a worldwide development.
That plan, introduced in 2020, was initially welcomed by residents weary from a historical past of air pollution and poisonous leaks. However some have grown skeptical because the venture’s particulars forged doubt on the environmental advantages of revamping the 127-year-old complicated on 1,100 acres in Rodeo, California.
The corporate’s preliminary declare that it will slash greenhouse gasses by half doesn’t match the venture’s environmental affect report, printed by county regulators, which reveals a 1% discount, in keeping with a Reuters calculation of emissions information within the report. What’s extra, refining of petroleum byproducts could proceed as a facet venture.
And renewable-diesel manufacturing would require a surge in marine and prepare site visitors, rising emissions and spill threat. The conversion additionally requires boosting natural-gas utilization to provide hydrogen required to make the biofuel.
These dynamics and different variables increase questions on Phillips 66’s advertising and marketing of renewable diesel as a inexperienced gasoline and make it unattainable to inform whether or not and the way a lot the refinery overhaul will cut back neighborhood air pollution, three unbiased environmental consultants instructed Reuters.
The venture’s environmental affect might be a take a look at case for related amenities worldwide. A number of dozen new U.S. renewable diesel crops are deliberate, in keeping with vitality consultancy Stratas Advisors. Most might be conversions of oil refineries. Manufacturing capability might triple, to six billion gallons, by 2026, Stratas says. Europe and Asia are seeing related developments.
The Rodeo conversion may very well be both “a mannequin or a cautionary story,” stated Gwen Ottinger, an affiliate professor within the Heart for Science, Expertise and Society at Drexel College who has studied air-pollution monitoring in Rodeo.
Phillips 66 representatives say the venture, dubbed Rodeo Renewed, will considerably lower sure regulated pollution and can result in giant cuts in greenhouse gasses when the biofuel is burned in automobiles. The refinery’s normal supervisor, Jolie Rhinehart, stated renewable diesel is the cleanest-burning choice to be used in transporting items by truck.
“Heavy-haul trucking is an important side to our lifestyle on this nation and on this world,” she stated. “And renewable diesel is the lowest-emission option to gasoline that vitality that we have to hold our vans transferring.”
Rhinehart added that emissions instantly from the plant, affecting native residents, could be “considerably decreased” by the venture.
Some Rodeo residents fear the overhaul might change into one other chapter in a protracted story of native air pollution. Sitting throughout the bay from San Francisco’s glittering cityscape, Rodeo is a poster little one for post-industrial issues. Along with the Phillips 66 plant, the world has hosted a second oil refinery, a lead smelter and a dynamite manufacturing facility. Vacant storefronts and rusted-out vehicles blight the boulevard resulting in a seaside too poisonous for swimming. The neighborhood, in unincorporated Contra Costa County, has a lot greater concentrations of sickness, poverty and brownfield cleanup websites than most others in California.
“It might have been the jewel of the county,” resident Janet Callaghan stated of Rodeo. However through the years, industrial air pollution has “turned Rodeo into the armpit of Contra Costa.”
Maureen Brennan, a member of Rodeo’s air-monitoring committee, known as the biofuels venture an experiment with unsure environmental advantages. After initially cheering the plan, she stated: “I began to comprehend that we’re truly the worldwide guinea pigs right here.”
CONFLICTING POLLUTION ESTIMATES
Renewable diesel is constituted of feedstocks corresponding to soybean oil, beef tallow or used cooking oil. It may be utilized in heavy-duty vans with no engine modifications. The Phillips 66 plant might also produce different biofuels.
The county board of supervisors in Could accredited the venture, which is anticipated to begin operations in early 2024.
Phillips 66 spokesperson Bernardo Fallas stated the distinction within the firm and county greenhouse-gas estimates stems largely from the truth that county regulators included air pollution projections for 5 fossil-fuel refinery processing items for which the corporate intends to maintain working permits. The corporate excluded these items, which Fallas stated wouldn’t be working when the biofuels venture begins. Phillips 66, he stated, has not but determined whether or not and the way the fossil-fuels items would function sooner or later.
Fallas confirmed, nonetheless, that Phillip 66 is contemplating a plan to course of slurry oil, a heavy residual byproduct, utilizing the refinery’s coker. Fallas stated the slurry-oil processing would produce supplies wanted for electric-vehicle batteries.
The county stated in a press release that slurry-oil processing “wouldn’t be constant” with the refinery revamp it accredited in Could, and would require further regulatory assessment.
The county’s environmental affect report estimated greenhouse gasses by assuming emissions from the coker and the 4 different items would stay unchanged, an method the research known as conservative. It additionally included emissions from the anticipated improve in natural-gas use and from projected will increase in transportation to the plant.
The declare has additionally made its method into filings with the Securities and Alternate Fee (SEC), together with an annual proxy assertion and a handful of 8-Ok disclosures.
The corporate’s disclosures to the SEC, nonetheless, dropped the 50% declare after the draft environmental affect report was printed in October 2021. The corporate stated it up to date its messaging to “guarantee consistency” with the report.
Whereas Phillips 66 and the county made strikingly totally different projections of the biofuels plant’s greenhouse-gas air pollution, they agreed that the venture would have a local weather profit extending past the ability’s native emissions. They stated biofuels produce much less greenhouse gasses than conventional gasoline or diesel when burned in automobiles. That reduces emissions over the entire “lifecycle” of the gasoline, which incorporates all points of exploration, manufacturing and consumption. Contemplating solely native air pollution from the plant, the county stated, underestimates the potential greenhouse-gas emissions reductions by “orders of magnitude.”
Some researchers, nonetheless, contest that declare. They argue that carbon emissions from clearing and tilling land to farm biofuels feedstocks, corresponding to corn or soybeans, offset any reductions in tailpipe emissions.
TRUCKS, TRAINS REPLACE A PIPELINE
Phillips 66 initiatives the conversion will cut back emissions of sure federally regulated air pollution, corresponding to benzene, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter. Sulfur oxide emissions are anticipated to drop 80% from 2019 ranges and bigger particulate matter air pollution by 20%, Fallas stated, citing the environmental affect report.
Three unbiased environmental consultants stated it’s seemingly a few of these emissions – together with these of greenhouse gasses – will fall merely due to a discount in general capability after the transformation. As an oil refinery, the plant processed practically 120,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude – way over the projected capability of 80,000 bpd of biofuels feedstocks.
The plant’s emissions after conversion are tough to foretell, the environmental consultants stated, due to the dearth of analysis on air pollution from large-scale renewable-diesel processing and since the corporate has not publicly outlined what feedstocks it’ll use. The Phillips 66 operation might end in reductions of some pollution, when in comparison with oil refining, however will increase in others, stated Mark Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Stanford College and director of the college’s Ambiance/Power Program.
“I count on to see no enchancment in any respect,” Jacobson stated.
“You will simply get a unique set of chemical substances popping out of the (biofuels) refineries in contrast with the normal refineries of diesel and gasoline.”
As well as, the surge in transportation associated to biofuels processing might worsen native air pollution, stated Ron Sahu, an unbiased air emissions guide.
Phillips 66 plans to close a 200-mile oil pipeline to the plant, resulting in a doubling of tanker vessels and a tripling of rail-car arrivals, in keeping with the environmental affect report. Truck site visitors will fall general however sharply rise to a part of the refining complicated closest to probably the most densely populated a part of Rodeo, bringing residents there in touch with extra particulate-matter and different transportation air pollution.
The venture can even trigger a projected 29% improve in greenhouse gasoline emissions from the plant that might be utilizing extra to provide hydrogen for biofuel processing, in keeping with the report.
Janet Pygeorge, 87, lives in view of the refinery’s smokestacks. She remembers a 1994 chemical leak on the refinery, then underneath totally different possession, that sickened tens of hundreds of individuals. A Phillips 66 predecessor firm purchased the refinery in 2001. Since then, the plant has had seven “main accidents,” together with fires and poisonous releases, by 2018, in keeping with the newest out there county information.
That historical past makes the prospect of continuous fossil-fuel operations unsettling to residents who lived by it, Pygeorge stated. “It simply does not sound secure to me.”
