BP Rides – and Fails –Again

Our purpose is reimagining energy for people and our planet. We want to help the world reach net zero and improve people’s lives. …

We want to be an energy company with purpose; one that is trusted by society, valued by shareholders and motivating for everyone who works at bp. 

BP Website, Our purpose

If that is BP’s purpose, it’s failing.

Nineteen years after 15 workers were killed in a massive explosion of volatile chemicals at BP’s Texas City Refinery, fourteen years after the explosion aboard BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed 11 workers (and caused the biggest environmental disaster in American history), and two years after an explosion and fire burned two brothers alive at the BP/Husky Refinery near Toledo, Ohio, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) issued a report last month describing BP’s decades long, chronic inability to learn from its many mistakes.

BP unloaded the Toledo refinery onto another company soon after the  2022 explosion, as it did with the Texas City refinery years ago. But for all its next generation pretensions, the company is still in the oil and gas business. It still operates refineries in Cherry Point, Washington and Whiting, Indiana that contribute 40% of BP’s global refining capacity. It claims that the two refineries provide the U.S. with energy that it needs “safely, reliably and efficiently.”

The United States has 132 active oil refineries, down from a peak of 254  in 1982. Most came on line in the seventies and few have been built since. Owners and operators have made extensive modifications to existing plants, installing new equipment and expanding their capacity. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) refinery capacity report lists them by location.

From Texas City to Toledo

The Chemical Safety Board report on the BP/Husky Toledo tragedy includes several troubling pages comparing its findings in the aftermath of the tragedies at the Texas City and the Toledo tragedies. What follows are more colloquial versions of both stories so eerily similar that they reveal a corporation still running amok when it comes to workers’ lives.

Texas City was the third largest refinery in the country in 2005, producing 11 million gallons of gasoline a day. The huge refinery by itself would have qualified as a Fortune 400 company, earning a profit of $900 million in 2004, the year before the explosion. But BP had bought the facility from Amoco, knowing that it had been poorly maintained and needed essential maintenance that would cost hundreds of millions. Despite that knowledge and the pleas of Texas City plant manager Don Parus, top management in London, England, not only rejected his pleas for additional funds, they imposed more cuts in the facility’s budget.

At the time,  spurred on by its haughty and influential CEO Sir John Browne, the company was driven relentlessly to become the largest oil company in the world. Old refineries were a necessary evil, not anything close to an inspiration for this blinkered quest.

When the deadly explosions occurred in Texas City and Toledo, both plants were putting equipment back online (called “startup) after shutdowns for maintenance (known as a “turnaround”) a process well known to be the most dangerous work at an chemical plant.

The Texas City catastrophe involved a huge piece of equipment known as an ISOM unit. ISOM is short for isomerization, the process by which petroleum is separated (or split) into distinct product streams like toluene, xylene, and benzene. The unit contained a “raffinate splitter tower” that extended 170 feet into the air. The unit worked on the principle that when a petroleum mixture is subjected to heat, different components reach their individual boiling points, some dropping to the bottom of the tower and others rising as gases that are then siphoned off and used for different purposes.

The Texas City refinery operators were inadequately trained to handle such an emergency, and supervision was inadequate, leaving the crew on its own. Furthermore, the operators were fatigued, having been working 29 or more consecutive 12-hour shifts without a day off.

To operate safely the tower should  never be filled with unfinished petroleum beyond a six to nine foot level. But a combination of serious problems coalesced that day, causing the tower to overfill. The tower level indicator that indicated how full the tower was, was not operating correctly, showing that the fluid level in the tower was declining, not rising. The operators were inadequately trained to handle such an emergency, and supervision was inadequate, leaving the crew on its own. Furthermore, the operators were fatigued, having been working 29 or more consecutive 12-hour shifts without a day off.

As the day shift transitioned to the night shift, the operators filled the tower to the hazardous level of 155 feet. Liquid and gas poured out of emergency overflow piping, traveling down the pipes to a “blowdown drum,” a barrel-shaped vessel that vented into the ambient air. Three pressure relief valves opened for six minutes, spewing a geyser like plume of 52,000 gallons of volatile liquid and gas that was heavier than the ambient air, and formed a vapor cloud. An idling truck parked nearby provided the ignition source. The resulting explosion was so powerful that houses three-quarters of a mile away from the plant were damaged.

The 15 victims had nothing to do with operating equipment at the refinery. They were contract workers doing office work in portable trailers placed far too close to the ISOM unit, in blatant violation of BP’s meaningless paper procedures and OSHA’s requirements. In addition to the placement of the trailers, the company had prepared legally required procedures for a pre-startup safety check that were also ignored.

In the aftermath of the explosion, BP hired James Baker, former White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of State and Treasury during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. The Report produced by Baker’s taskforce concluded that the explosion was attributable to a culture that failed to learn lessons, underfunded safety, allowed crucial components of the physical plant to “run to failure,” tolerated serious deviations from safe operating practices, showed complacency toward serious process safety, and penalized workers for expressing safety concerns.

Safety expert Andrew Hopkins, writing independently, attributed the root causes of the Texas City fiasco to BP’s chronic “failure to learn,” a paralytic and disastrous condition brought on in the first place by fanatical cost-cutting at plants that are not top priorities for the company. Hopkins adds that failure to learn is characterized by managerial resistance to acting in response to frequent, compelling warnings that the company must address conditions that endanger workforce safety.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued a $21.3 million citation against BP, which was at that time the largest penalty ever issued by OSHA – until the agency issued an $81.3 million fine 4 years later for BP’s failure to comply with the settlement that came out of the 2005 explosion.

Toledo: Failure to Learn

Fast forward almost two decades and 1200 miles to Toledo, Ohio and the BP/Husky refinery. The country was just emerging from the worst of the pandemic when demand for electricity shrank precipitously. BP was rushing to get the Toledo refinery back on line because many of its competitors were running at full capacity.

Once again, a vapor cloud, this time composed of 23,000 pounds of highly volatile naphtha ignited, causing a fire that consumed the two brothers.

And, once again, the liquid naphtha should not have been in the affected tanks and pipes. It leaked from an overflowing tower into a drum that normally held vapor used as fuel for furnaces or other conventional equipment. The problem percolated throughout the day shift at the plant but the refinery day and night shift were harassed by the triggering of 3,712 alarms indicating equipment problems between 6:50 a.m. and 6:49 p.m. on the day of the accident. No one seemed able to cope with why they were triggered, much less turn them off.

The Morrissey brothers, both working on the night shift (one brother was assigned to the shift and the other brother stayed to help him), made the lethal decision to discharge naphtha onto the ground, believing erroneously that it was amine water — a substance used in making dyes and nylon, as well as medicines and drugs  — that was irritating to eyes and throat but not volatile. As they tried to spread the naphtha vapor out, a spark ignited the mixture.

The plant experienced a similar problem in 2019. Although operators responded to that incident effectively, no measures were taken to prevent a similar future incident. The CSB concluded that had the BP Toledo Refinery implemented additional preventive safeguards, the 2022 incident would likely never have happened.

Both the Toledo and Texas City catastrophes illustrate the arrogance and deep-seated scofflaw of BP, a corporation regarded as too big to fail, much less jail.

Both the Toledo and Texas City catastrophes illustrate the arrogance and deep-seated scofflaw of BP, a corporation regarded as too big to fail, much less jail. The Baker Report – commissioned by BP —  had warned the giant petroleum company that it should use the lessons learned to transform the company into an industry leader in process safety management. BP’s Chief Executive, Lord John Browne announced that the company would implement the panel’s recommendations, but BP clearly ignored the report’s lessons, costing many more lives in the decades since.

OSHA issued ten citations for “serious” violations at the BP/Husky Refinery within a year after the conflagration that killed the Morrissey brothers. The fine for the violations was $156,250, later reduced to $135,000. Of course, these amounts were constrained by the Occupational Safety and Health Act passed in 1971 and never updated thanks to overpowering opposition by every industry the agency regulates.

A serious violation is one that could cause an incident likely to result in death or serious injury. The OSHA case remains unresolved and, as mentioned earlier, BP sold the plant to another company. The Wall Street Journal wrote a long article on the incident, focusing on its impact on the Morrissey family, and followed up with coverage of the CSB report.

Meanwhile, BP sails on, rebranded as the innovative company that will save us from climate change.  It depends on the short memories of all the Americans who have watched it cause terrible damage, to people and the environment.

BP’s commitment to a purpose “trusted by society, valued by shareholders and motivating for everyone who works at bp” has failed.  For the Morrissey brothers’ sake, and for the sake of the family members devastated by Texas City, let’s not forget.