After years of asthma, sickness, and death for nearby residents, Los Angeles’ Phillips 66 refinery is on its way out. Now, frontline communities are counting on elected officials and responsible agencies to clean up refinery sites and ensure the safety, health, and wellbeing of nearby residents and workers.
A new report from Asian Pacific Environmental Network and Communities for a Better Environment, “Before the Last Drop: Lessons from the Phillips 66 Closure,” is a first comprehensive assessment of existing state and local measures to safeguard communities and workers when refineries close.
More refineries will shutter in the years ahead as clean energy becomes cheaper and gasoline demand drops. “Before the Last Drop” explains what residents can expect when a closure happens, and what policymakers can do to prepare for future refinery closures.
With years of clean-up and redevelopment ahead, report findings include:
- Refineries, unlike other types of energy infrastructure, have almost no end-of-life planning requirements. The resulting lack of information and financial assurances for completion of cleanup hampers community redevelopment planning, and risks inadequate cleanup funding.
- Refinery sites are massively contaminated. Cleaning up these sites will be a costly and enormous multi-year undertaking.
- Big Oil and developers’ business practices tend to cut communities and local governments out of refinery site redevelopment planning processes unless local government takes proactive steps to ensure robust community involvement.
- Failure to plan for pre-closure worker retention increases risks of understaffing and the attendant risk of refinery accidents.
- Lack of coordination among agencies and stakeholders risks chaos and lack of accountability in decommissioning, remediation, and redevelopment processes.
- Failure to prepare for refinery transitions may lead to severe economic impacts for workers and communities.
“Before the Last Drop” proposes a set of common-sense policy interventions to protect workers and nearby residents on the frontline of refinery pollution.
Elected leaders at the state level must intervene to ensure accountability for closure costs and a Just Transition:
✅ Require a full disclosure of refinery cleanup and shut-down costs.
✅ Require a system of financial assurance to pay for those cleanup costs.
✅ Strengthen and develop industrial safety laws to specifically address staffing and safety in the runup to refinery closure.
✅ Create and implement standards and best practices for worker retention following a closure announcement.
✅ Support displaced workers.
Recommendations for the Cities of Carson and Los Angeles:
- Include community representatives and relevant stakeholders in stakeholder taskforces.
- Encourage use of community benefit and project labor agreements.
- Conduct a site redevelopment visioning process.
- Support sound state-level refinery policy to encourage transparency of refinery cleanup costs.
