Texas’ Hazy Smog Record a Gritty Reality for Bush

Back in the 1950s, black soot and foul fumes poured into the air above Los Angeles as oil companies produced the gasoline that fueled Southern Californians’ cars.

Half a century and billions of dollars worth of smog controls later, the Los Angeles area’s 14 oil refineries are among the most heavily regulated industries in America, slashing their air pollutants to a fraction of what they were. For the oil industry, it is a dramatic success story, one that has contributed greatly to Southern California’s victories in its war against smog.

Yet in Houston, which last year suffered the nation’s worst smog, refineries have made little progress. While much of the nation has steadily cleaned its air, Houston’s smog has worsened, and industrial plants still spew large volumes of pollutants. Houston’s refineries are 10 to 20 years behind Los Angeles-area refineries in controlling their pollution.

With Texas Gov. George W. Bush running for president, the state’s record on environmental protection has taken on new relevance nationally.

The environment has come up only occasionally during the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Bush’s opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), has a consistently pro-business record on the environment, and neither candidate has stressed the issue.

But in the general election, if Bush becomes the Republican nominee, his environmental record is almost certain to be a major point of difference with the Democrats.

U.S. Threatens Texas Over Clean-Air Rules

Thursday, Vice President Al Gore previewed a likely Democratic line of attack, saying in a speech in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., that under Bush, Texas “has become No. 1 in pollution of air, pollution of the water and pollution of the land.”

In fact, Texas’ laissez-faire attitude toward industrial pollution dates back long before Bush became governor in 1994. But Bush, who headed an oil and gas exploration company for 12 years, has done little to change Texas’ policies until recent months, after federal officials threatened to cut off highway construction money if Texas failed to meet clean-air deadlines.

“The biggest difference between Texas and us is the dominance of the oil industry there,” said Gail Ruderman Feuer, an air quality expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Los Angeles. “You need the will of state officials to push further, and California has had the will of a variety of public agencies as well as the people, while Texas has not.”

Although proven technologies to control emissions have been available for decades, a Houston plant emits as much as five times more smog-forming pollutants than a comparable-sized Southern California one, a Times analysis shows.

Officials at the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission declined to comment on the comparison between California and Texas oil refineries. But they say that by the end of this year the commission--its members appointed by Bush--will mandate a series of actions to clean up smog, many of them tailored after California’s.

“To assume that Texas isn’t doing enough is just not accurate. There are all kinds of rule proposals now,” said Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the Texas commission. “We’ve got some severe [smog] problems . . . and we have proposed very, very deep cuts in emissions.”

Last summer, Houston was crowned the nation’s smog capital, claiming the title--at least temporarily--that the Los Angeles area held for half a century. Texans in the Houston/Galveston area breathed unhealthier concentrations of ozone on more days last year than did Southern Californians--even people living in inland valleys and the mountains around San Bernardino. In addition to the Houston area, the Dallas, Beaumont and El Paso areas have unhealthy smog levels.

Unlike Southern California, where cars and trucks are the main culprits, more than half of Houston’s pollution comes from industry, led by the giant oil refineries lining the Houston Ship Channel.

In 1998, the Shell/Deer Park refinery near Houston spewed 17,520 tons of sulfur, nitrogen and organic gases into the air. That is about five times more than Chevron’s plant in El Segundo or Arco’s plant in Wilmington, although the plants refine similar volumes of oil, according to data from the South Coast Air Quality Management District and the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission.

In 1998, for each barrel of crude oil processed, Texas refineries emitted three times more pollution-forming gases than Southern California refineries, according to the Times analysis.

In the late 1970s, Southland oil companies had to install multimillion-dollar scrubbers to eliminate clouds of sulfur oxides, which smell like rotten eggs and can cause breathing problems. More than 20 years later, Houston refineries have done nothing to clean the sulfur up.

Also, 12 years ago, refineries in the Los Angeles area spent more than $400 million retrofitting industrial boilers and heaters to reduce nitrogen oxide fumes. Oil refineries around Houston are only starting now to do that under a new Texas rule, said David Schanbacher, an air quality official at the Texas resource commission.

Refineries Undergo Engineering Changes

In all, refineries in Southern California must follow about 30 specific smog-control rules. Michael Wang, environmental manager of the Western States Petroleum Assn., said that has required engineering changes to every major aspect of the massive plants. Each Los Angeles area refinery is “about 10 times cleaner” than it was 15 years ago, Wang said.

AQMD inventory data show that from 1975 to 1997, major air pollutants at Southland refineries declined at least 60% to 85%. The pace of industry’s smog reductions has slowed, but more improvements are coming.

Texas finds itself in the unenviable predicament of having only a few years to catch up with what California already has done. The deadline under the Clean Air Act for achieving healthful air in Texas is 2007. The changes will be expensive, contentious and painful for a state that long has shielded its industries from pollution controls.

“It’s frustrating for us because you could close the entire Houston Ship Channel and not reach attainment of smog standards,” said Cindy Morphew of the Texas Oil and Gas Assn. “We’re on a track of things being much cleaner than they were, but it’s never going to be enough.”

Texas Plan Still Not as Strict as L.A.’s Rules

In a proposal expected later this year, Texas plans to require all major industries in the Houston area to slash nitrogen oxides 90%. The requirements still will not be as stringent as those in the Los Angeles region, Schanbacher said. Texas also plans to adopt California’s stringent low-emission standards for new cars as well as other rules tackling vehicle exhaust.

Bush, noting that industrial emissions in Texas have declined 10% since he took office, said in an October speech, shortly after Houston suffered a record-breaking siege of smog, that he was “proud of this record but not content.” If the new proposals are enacted, his administration will do more to control smog than any of his predecessors in Texas, aides say.

“Environmentalists should be praising Gov. Bush for his efforts to significantly reduce industrial emissions instead of polluting his record,” said Scott McClellan, a Bush campaign aide. The Houston region soon will have “one of the strictest plans in the country to reduce smog-forming pollutants,” he said.

Environmentalists, however, say that the state’s plans still rely too heavily on voluntary actions by the oil companies and have been undertaken only in reaction to federal mandates.

And oil industry representatives say that even with the new proposals there is no comparison between the Texas government and the Los Angeles Basin’s AQMD.

“They [the AQMD] would get run out of the state here,” said one Texas oil company manager who asked to remain unidentified. “Texas is still a state in which the issues of growth and development are not part of the political milieu. They don’t want to do anything that could be construed as anti-growth. It’s not strictly Gov. Bush. It predates him.”

Texas smog has violated federal health standards for more than 25 years, as long as California’s has. But Texas has fought the EPA since Congress in 1972 adopted the Clean Air Act, the nation’s most powerful environmental law.

That same year, the Texas Legislature “grandfathered” large industrial plants, granting them permission to continue emitting their 1972 levels of pollution.

The reprieve is gradually ending. A new voluntary cleanup program, initiated by Bush, uses sanctions and incentives to persuade the grandfathered factories to cut emissions. So far, pollution reductions are mandatory only for electric power plants.

“Gov. Bush was the first governor in Texas history to call in owners of grandfathered plants and tell them to clean up,” said campaign aide McClellan.

That voluntary approach, criticized by environmentalists, is consistent with Bush’s overall view of regulation. “This country is entering a new era of environmental policy. An era of cooperation, not coercion, of responsibility, not heavy-handed regulation,” he said in a speech last fall in Dallas.

Crimmins of the Texas resource commission said the state’s voluntary program will ease the way for aging plants, which need massive smog retrofits at a “shocking cost that could put these companies out of business,” he said.

In Southern California, though, economists have found no evidence of job losses at oil refineries from the high costs of smog control. Several small refineries have shut down, but all the region’s large ones remain.

“If anything, air quality regulation probably increased employment slightly,” Boston University economists Eli Berman and Linda Bui said in a 1998 study. Refinery production also increased, they wrote.

California’s cleaner air has, however, carried a steep price tag.

Smog rules are one reason gasoline costs more in California. But because so many things affect price, no one has been able to calculate how much smog rules raise gasoline prices.

In Los Angeles, on average, each refinery spends $3 million for every new smog rule and $5 million when an existing rule is strengthened, according to Berman and Bui’s study.

Los Angeles area industries increased their spending rate on smog controls in the 1980s at a rate 10 times higher than the national average, the economists said.

Southern California industries “faced much faster increases in [smog] abatement costs than comparable plants in Texas and Louisiana, regions essentially free of local air quality regulation,” the economists reported.

Still, refineries remain the Southland’s largest industrial source of air pollution. And like Houston, the region still has a long way to go in achieving healthful air. As Texas struggles to catch up, AQMD officials are planning more rules that will force improvements at businesses throughout the region, including oil refineries.

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GORE HIGHLIGHTS ISSUE: Vice president emphasizes his reputation as environmentalist and attacks Bush’s record. A26

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Pollutants in L.A. vs. Houston

Oil refineries in the Los Angeles area have dramatically reduced their air pollution over the last few decades because of regional smog-control rules. In Houston, which last year surpassed Southern California as the nation’s smog capital, the rules are much more lax. A comparison of two similarly sized refineries shows the Texas one in 1998 emitted about five times more pollutants than the California one.