BP Refinery Under Fire

On July 15th, the Chicago Tribune ran an article about the BP oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana, and how they "got a break" dumping more ammonia and industrial sludge into Lake Michigan.

Here is a clip from the article in the Tribune:

Indiana regulators exempted BP from state environmental laws to clear the way for a $3.8 billion expansion that will allow the company to refine heavier Canadian crude oil. They justified the move in part by noting the project will create 80 new jobs.

Under BP's new state water permit, the refinery — already one of the largest polluters along the Great Lakes — can release 54 percent more ammonia and 35 percent more sludge into Lake Michigan each day. Ammonia promotes algae blooms that can kill fish, while sludge is full of concentrated heavy metals.

What the article doesn't go to on to tell you is that even with the increased releases into Lake Michigan, BP will remain well within federal pollution guidelines and that both federal as well as state environmental officials have reviewed the company's plans.

They also fail to mention that BP does not release sludge into Lake Michigan.

All releases from the BP refinery (which will be modernized with $3 billion to process additional heavy crude oil from Canada) contain 99.9% water, not sludge. All sludge at the BP refinery is treated separately, following state and federal requirements and is never discharged into Lake Michigan. In fact, over the course of the past four years, BP has voluntarily reduced the amount of suspended solids in it's water discharge by 40%.

The Tribune obviously doesn't want you to know that. Rather than focus on our country's dependence on foreign oil and how no new oil refineries have been built in the United States within the past 29 years, they would rather scare their readers by playing the "environmental" card, when the "risk" they talk about is negligible.

Sure, there are risks where a refinery like this is concerned, but they should report the facts and point out benefits as well, so people can put something like this into perspective. I don't expect a paper like the Tribune to focus on America's increasing demand for oil and the fact that it would be more prudent to focus on the need for new refineries, but they could at least offer an objective view that is fair to both sides of the argument, and even truthful to the facts.

You can read more from BP's side of the story on BP's Whiting Refinery Fact Sheet.