BP must pay more than $500,000 for repeated pollution violations at refinery on Lake Michigan

After repeated air pollution violations at its northwest Indiana refinery along Lake Michigan, BP must pay $512,450 in penalties as part of a settlement released Thursday to resolve a lawsuit filed by environmental organizations.

The more than century-old BP Whiting Refinery was sued in federal court in 2019 for regularly violating legal limits on fine particulate pollution, otherwise known as soot, in 2016, 2017 and 2018. This type of pollution can trigger asthma and heart attacks, along with other respiratory and cardiovascular heath issues.

In fact, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that each ton of fine particles released by refineries imposes a cost on public health: between $360,000 to $830,000 annually.

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The British oil giant was legally obligated to fix the problems and report the illegal emissions from its petroleum processing units, called catalytic crackers, yet failed to do so, the suit alleged.

"We’re happy with the outcome, because the settlement will beef up monitoring and improve operation of the pollution controls, which will reduce particulate emissions that fall on people living downwind," said Eric Schaeffer, the executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project and former director of civil enforcement at EPA.

The EIP is one of the environmental groups that brought the suit, along with the Sierra Club's Hoosier Chapter, the Environmental Law and Policy Center and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The U.S. Department of Justice joined in the negotiations over the case on behalf of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in October 2020, and both federal agencies worked with BP and the environmental groups to reach the agreement. The State of Indiana and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management also signed onto the settlement.

BP said in an emailed statement to IndyStar that it "is pleased to resolve these issues. We remain committed to safe, reliable and compliant operations at the Whiting Refinery and everywhere we operate."

In addition to the $512,450 civil penalty, the settlement requires significant improvements to the monitoring and reporting of soot emissions from the facility, which is the nation's sixth largest and one of its oldest. It has the capacity to process more than 400,000 barrels of crude oil every day.

Under the agreement, BP also must improve the operation of pollution control systems that are designed to reduce such harmful pollution.

The lawsuit alleged that BP failed to operate its pollution control equipment at the necessary levels, and sometimes not at all, for nearly 3,500 hours from 2015 to 2019. Even more, the oil company did not report these incidents to regulators as required by law, the lawsuit claimed.

Because EIP and the other environmental groups have joined the settlement as parties, that means they have the right, along with the EPA and IDEM, to enforce the new requirements.

Schaeffer told IndyStar that he is concerned about IDEM's capacity to enforce the federal laws they administer, partially due to a lack of resources.

"Bottom line is that we expect EPA and environmental organizations will need to monitor compliance with these requirements and take action if they are violated," he said.

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This is not the first time the Whiting Refinery has faced scrutiny for its emissions.

The EPA and state of Indiana as well as six environmental groups and two individual plaintiffs sued BP a decade ago over air pollution issues. A federal consent decree was negotiated in 2012, which laid out various emission limits and monitoring requirements to ensure the company met said limits.

However, several of the environmental organizations that signed on found evidence that BP was violating the requirements of the 2012 agreement. That's when the four groups decided to file the suit in 2019, which lead to the new settlement announced Thursday.

A separate lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club also alleged air pollution violations from the Whiting Refinery's boilers — which are different from the oil processing units. A federal judge agreed with the group and ruled to hold BP liable for years of pollution. The judge largely basing his April ruling on test results that BP provided to IDEM between 2015 and 2018. Those tests showed that boilers at the refinery released illegal concentrations of particulate matter on multiple occasions.

All while these issues were being litigated, BP submitted several applications to state regulators asking them to essentially eliminate the emissions limits that the groups were trying to enforce. Instead, the company wanted to replace them with new standards that Schaeffer said would "allow substantially higher emissions and be harder to enforce."

On the same April day the judge ruled against BP, IDEM issued the new permit that the oil company had asked for. Schaeffer said that EIP has filed a petition that asks EPA to object to that "much weaker permit" and he expects the agency to "eventually rule in our favor."

That process, however, has temporarily slowed down resolution of the enforcement case, Schaeffer added.

"We’d like to see a greater willingness [from Indiana] to enforce the Clean Air Act and other laws that protect public health," he said.

Call IndyStar reporter Sarah Bowman at 317-444-6129 or email at sarah.bowman@indystar.com. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook: @IndyStarSarah. Connect with IndyStar’s environmental reporters: Join The Scrub on Facebook.

IndyStar's environmental reporting project is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: BP must pay up for repeated pollution violations at Indiana refinery