Texas Clean Air Project Updates

ExxonMobil’s Baytown, Texas, refinery and olefins plant began 2013 the same way they ended 2012: with large, unauthorized emissions of harmful air pollutants into the surrounding neighborhoods east of Houston. A citizen enforcement suit to end such instances of illegal emissions has been pending in federal court in Houston since December 2010. In the final weeks of 2012, ExxonMobil reported three large “emission events” – releases of air pollution not authorized by its federal Clean Air Act permits – to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). In one event alone, 57 tons of sulfur dioxide, a respiratory irritant, were released in just 18 hours beginning just before midnight on December 20, when a compressor “tripped” at the refinery’s Booster Station 4 unit.

HOUSTON – Sierra Club and Environment Texas filed a lawsuit today in federal district court against ExxonMobil Corporation and two subsidiaries to enforce thousands of violations of the Clean Air Act at the nation’s largest oil refinery and chemical plant complex, located in Baytown, Texas. 

HOUSTON – Sierra Club and Environment Texas announced today that they have filed a proposed Consent Decree in federal court that would settle their Clean Air Act lawsuit against Chevron Phillips Chemical Company.  If approved by U.S. District Judge Nancy F. Atlas, the settlement agreement would bring significant changes to the company’s Cedar Bayou Chemical Plant, a complex of manufacturing facilities located in Baytown that is one of the largest in the Houston area.