Traffic Jam at the Refinery

PORT ARTHUR, TX. The police cars turned their lights on and pulled into the middle of the busy 4-lane street in front of the Total Petroleum refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, just before 5 p.m. At half-block intervals, several other pairs of cruisers did the same. The officers climbed out and began using orange cones to create makeshift turn lanes in the road.

I stumbled accidentally into this unfamiliar scene. At first I thought there was an emergency. But according to one of the officers, this is a daily ritual at the refinery; it keeps traffic moving as the main shift ends at 5 o'clock. At a nearby gas station, a dozen cars waited at the curb. There was a woman in each driver’s seat that I could see, and two toddlers were crying in the back of one black low-rider. I didn’t ask, but it seemed pretty likely that they all were waiting to pick up their men

The company’s website say they employ 770 people, but it seemed like many more as parking lots disgorged pickup trucks, sedans, and a remarkable number of long yellow school buses all crowded with workers.

“Unprecedented size provides strong economies of scale,” the company’s website boasts. Indeed. Total is the 27th largest refinery in the country; numbers 6, 12, and 13 are within a few miles of here. Together these refineries have a capacity of more than 1 billion barrels of oil per day. Total can handle 232,000 barrels, plus 5.2 billion pounds of other products.

Among many other ways they manipulate hydrocarbons, the company says it is one of the largest naphtha steam crackers in the world. And no, that’s not something you eat. Cracking converts the products of the refinery crude into “light” oil products like gasoline and valuable building blocks for everyday products. In addition to high-octane gas, the folks I saw heading home help make Ethylene, Propylene and Butadiene. These are turned into myriad products including traffic barrier cones, housing insulation, recycling bins, carpet yarns, food packaging, geotextiles, fibrous filling for sleeping bags, and on, and on.

In many ways, our world revolves around petroleum. Most of us are at least vaguely aware that petrochemicals are part of almost everything that we value, from medical equipment to electricity to iPods. But somehow that fact hit home in a different way while sitting in a 5 p.m. traffic jam, in the shadow of a forest of blinking refinery towers, on my way to visit an oil spill.

Total Petrochemicals Inc, as seen from the Taft Elementary School playground

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