Refinerys dump chemicals in SF bay

Refineries massive chemical dumping in S.F. bay

by Jessica Wolfrom

SF Examiner

Jan 27, 2023

With nearly a half billion gallons of toxic wastewater spilling out of refineries across the United States every day, including into San Francisco Bay, environmental groups are urging the Environmental Protection Agency to enact stricter water pollution standards. 

The call comes after a new analysis of EPA regulatory data revealed that the agency is failing to adequately regulate and enforce restrictions of harmful discharges.

The analysis, conducted by the Environmental Integrity Project, found that the nation’s top environmental agency has not kept pace with the 1972 Clean Water Act, which mandates the EPA update its requirements every five years in line with advancing treatment technologies. Additionally, the findings show that the EPA has routinely failed to enforce permit violations of weaker and outdated standards.

“Nobody thinks that a rotary phone, which we still had in the 1970s, is the best available technology for making a phone call in 2023,” said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project and past director of civil enforcement at EPA. “That same thinking was applied in the Clean Water Act — as treatment methods improved, the standards need to get tighter.”

A previously ignored water source will require cities to rethink flood projections, building codes and adaptation planning

But that hasn’t happened, Schaeffer said. Instead, those standards have gone largely unrevised for nearly four decades and still apply to only a small handful of pollutants — all while refinery operations have only expanded.

As a result, hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic wastewater rush out of refineries every day, dumping a deluge of unregulated and potentially harmful chemicals, like PFAs and heavy metals, into ecosystems and posing a threat to wildlife and human health, particularly for low-income residents and communities of color.

It’s a troubling finding that comes as new reporting shows the EPA is struggling to keep up with a torrent of complex regulations central to the Biden administration’s ambitious climate goals after the exodus of more than 1,200 scientists and experts during the Trump era.

“Despite depleted staffing levels, persistent funding challenges, and a previous administration that left the agency neglected and scientifically compromised ... the agency is moving further and faster than ever before,” Dan Utech, EPA director Michael Regan’s chief of staff, told the New York Times in a statement.

But when it comes to regulating refineries, the agency has fallen behind, the analysis shows. Of the 81 U.S. refineries surveyed, at least 56 dump their effluent waste into river lakes and estuaries, contributing to the impairment of downstream waterways, Schaeffer noted.

Four of those studied, including the Chevron Richmond and Valero Benicia refineries, have released more than a million pounds of nitrogen and thousands of pounds of nickel selenium and ammonia, as well as oil and grease, arsenic, cyanide and hexavalent chromium, into San Francisco Bay and its tributaries in 2021 alone.

“California has a reputation of being an environmentally friendly place,” said Sejal Choksi-Chugh, executive director of San Francisco Baykeeper, an environmental watchdog. But, she added, “San Francisco Bay is officially recognized as impaired by selenium pollution."

Once in the aquatic environment, selenium, a naturally occurring mineral that can be toxic at high levels, can rapidly bioaccumulate in food chains, studies by the USDA show, meaning even a small amount can cause significant environmental hazards. Selenium has already had devastating impacts on Bay Areal fish, including the Sacramento split tail, a species found nowhere else in the world.

A recent study from UC Davis found split tails collected from a pumping station in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River with zigzagging spines that curved in unnatural angles. Deformities were also found in birds exposed to selenium concentrated in agricultural runoff in the same area in the 1980s.

“This was not just a few fish; it was the majority of them,” said Fred Feyrer, a research fish biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey and co-lead of the research.

And it’s not just selenium that’s wreaking havoc on bay ecosystems. Local refineries dumped at least 1.2 million pounds of nitrogen into bay waters in 2021 — the same nutrient responsible for the unprecedented algal bloom that overtook San Francisco Bay last summer, killing an untold number of fish, rays and other aquatic life.

Though much of what is dumped into waterways is technically legal, the report found that almost 83% of refineries exceeded their permitted limits on water pollutants at least once between 2019 to 2021, according to EPA enforcement and compliance records. Chevron’s Richmond refinery was cited 27 times for exceeding its permitted pollution limits. Still, only about a quarter of the refineries with violations were penalized, the report found.

A spokesperson for Chevron said its Richmond refinery’s stormwater releases are managed under strict Regional Water Quality Control Board permits and that its treated water is discharged in compliance with allowable environmental limits. He also said that the analysis uses inaccurate permit limits to calculate releases and instead pointed to California’s Integrated Water Quality System, which shows the refinery had one violation over five years.

“Chevron Richmond remains in compliance with federal, state and local water regulatory standards,” said Ross Allen, an external affairs advisor for Chevron.

But nitrogen output is also sapping the health of waters in the gulf states, including Texas, where much of the oil industry is based. “The oxygen-starving pollutant is the primary reason we have a dead zone near the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico that covered more than 6,000 square miles in 2021,” said Schaeffer.

John Beard spent many years working in refineries in Port Arthur, Texas, widely considered the world’s petroleum capital. At a press conference this week, Beard spoke about the lax monitoring and rampant flushing he witnessed during his time working in what he called “the belly of the beast,” a place where Louisiana dissolves into Texas through a bay that feeds into the Gulf of Mexico.

“Whatever that’s in that water that’s in the plant — it’s part of that water that’s being pumped out,” said Beard, now the founder of the Port Arthur Community Action Network, an environmental justice nonprofit. “Think about that next time you’re on the Gulf Coast in this area, and you go swimming or boating, or you hunt and fish and take that home to consume for yourself and your family. That is how we become oppressed by it.”

Two-thirds of the refineries studied are situated in areas where the percentage of low-income households within a three-mile radius exceeds the national average. These communities often have less access to open outdoor recreational spaces and are more likely to rely on fishing for food, which can have direct health impacts.

“They don’t build these facilities in Beverly Hills or River Oaks or Madison Avenue,” said Beard.

While refineries are far from the only industry that sends wastewater into waterways, advocates say this industry is a major contributor to the deterioration of ecosystems and bodies of water that ultimately exist in the public domain.

“I’m old enough to remember how bad water pollution was in this country before the Clean Water Act came along promising that our public waterways would be fishable and swimmable within a few short years,” said Schaeffer. “We’ve seen real improvement since then, but our progress has stalled. These are not simply the fishable and swimmable waters we were promised.”