Major Richmond Refinery Accidents Settled as Part of Chevron Deal

An agreement local air regulators made with Chevron earlier this year includes the settling of dozens of violations tied to some of the largest accidents at the company’s Richmond refinery over the last five years.

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District announced in February that it had reached deals with Chevron and the Martinez Refining Company, ending a legal war over a rule intended to reduce a harmful form of pollution emitted by the energy companies’ local refineries.

Under the agreement, Chevron is also paying $20 million to settle 678 separate violations related to its Richmond refinery. That marks the highest penalty agreement the energy giant has ever made with the air district, according to Philip Fine, the agency’s executive officer.

“This a new era of enforcement and holding facilities accountable,” Fine told the Richmond City Council on Feb. 27. “They need to feel these penalties in order to incentivize them to stay in compliance.”

The deal resolves all of the air district’s open enforcement actions with Chevron that took place between 2019 and June 30, 2023.

“We believe this resolution will allow us to turn our full focus on the future safe and reliable operation of our facility,” Chevron said in a statement sent by company spokesperson Caitlin Powell.

Air district officials told KQED 105 of the violations Chevron settled are tied to eight major incidents at the refinery over the last five years. They include several cases in which refinery components malfunctioned, leading to flaring.

Flaring operations take place when refineries send gasses to their flares to reduce pressure inside the facilities during malfunctions as well as start-up and shutdown operations. Oil industry officials have emphasized that the practice is a way to prevent more serious and possibly dangerous accidents.

Some of the flaring operations involved in the settlement released significant amounts of toxic gas into the air above the Richmond area. In several of these incidents, nearby residents could see black smoke and fire bursting into the sky, with some calling the air district to complain. Those cases garnered a significant amount of news coverage and social media posts.

Regulators say 71 of the violations are connected to several days of pollution releases from the Richmond refinery that began Oct. 24, 2021, when one of the Bay Area’s strongest storms in recent years brought significant rain to the region. The refinery sustained a series of malfunctions that led to three days of flaring and significant concerns by Richmond area residents.

Two weeks after the releases started, the City Council asked Chevron executives to explain what happened in a public hearing. Residents who showed up to the virtual meeting left upset. They complained that company representatives did not have an explanation for what caused the major refinery malfunction. One of them, Randy Joseph, told the council and the company that he learned nothing from the hearing.

Reached two and a half years later, on the heels of the deal that essentially closes the book on that accident, Joseph said his dissatisfaction with Chevron has not subsided.

“Chevron always has the answers,” Joseph said in an interview. “They just refuse to share with us. They know they’re polluting. They also know they can come and say nothing and get away with it,” he said.

A few months after the October 2021 incident, KQED reported that problems started when an atmospheric river storm poured rain through a leaky roof into a key part of the refinery, triggering significant power and steam loss. That, in turn, knocked half a dozen petroleum processing units offline, caused a small fire, and resulted in several days in which the refinery flared off toxic gases.

“They never came back to City Council. They never came back and explained. They never came back to apologize,” said Joseph, who is a community organizer with the group Reimagine Richmond and said he only learned of the cause of that accident from KQED’s reporting.

Chevron says it informs the public and the air district about its releases. The company points out that residents can check real-time air quality data through the refinery’s fenceline monitoring system. The causes of many flaring events are posted several months later on the air district’s website.

“Chevron Richmond also will be implementing various improvements to our flare monitoring and sampling systems and setting up ways to discuss flaring events and other air quality issues directly with our community,” the company said through its representative.

The 71 violations for the October 2021 incident involve times in which Chevron broke public nuisance, permit condition, visible emission and flare monitoring regulations, according to Kristine Roselius, an air district spokesperson. But the settlement essentially obscures the fine amount for each penalty.

“We accounted for the seriousness of these violations in determining an appropriate overall penalty amount for all the covered violations, but there is no allocation of specific dollar amounts to each individual violation, Roselius said in an email.

In the last decade, the oil industry has successfully killed or delayed legislative attempts to increase penalties on refineries that violate air quality laws in California. The most recent bill, proposed by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), would increase the ceiling of many of those penalties to $30,000 per violation. That bill, AB 1465, is on hold.

Air district officials say 13 of Chevron’s violations settled in the recent deal were tied to an incident on Nov. 2, 2020, when an incorrectly labeled electrical diagram caused a power outage leading to the flaring of more than 100,000 pounds of sulfur dioxide and other chemicals.

The agency says 11 other violations were connected to a malfunction at the Richmond refinery on March 9, 2023, when a hydrogen-producing plant tripped offline thanks to an electrical equipment malfunction. On the same day, a fire broke out thanks to a pump seal leak.

For years, Chevron’s Richmond refinery has flared more than the Bay Area’s other refineries.

The company argues that its “flaring performance has been steadily improving over the past few years.”

“To supplement these efforts, we will be formalizing an operator training program related to flare reduction and conducting a comprehensive assessment of previous flaring events to identify if any additional corrective actions are warranted,” the company said.