Refinery to Phase Out Toxic Chemical

Carol Piseno, a single mother from Wilmington, wasn’t about to let her neighborhood become the next Bhopal. Worried that a notorious chemical nicknamed “HF” would leak from the local Ultramar refinery and blanket the area with a deadly cloud, Piseno and her neighbors campaigned to have it banned.

Now, Ultramar is set to become the last petroleum refinery in California to phase out the use of concentrated hydrogen fluoride.

On Friday, the South Coast Air Quality Management District board approved an agreement with the refinery under which it must switch to a less toxic form of the lung-searing chemical by the end of 2005 or face a fine of as much as $1 million.

The agreement marks the culmination of a 16-year campaign to regulate hydrogen fluoride in Southern California. The effort began when the tragedy in Bhopal, India, and other incidents revealed the dangers posed by toxic chemical releases in urban areas.

The campaign drew national attention, but appeared to founder in the early 1990s on a legal technicality. Still, air regulators -- and activists such as Piseno -- kept on.

“For the agency, this was some unfinished business,” said Barry R. Wallerstein, the air district’s executive officer. “We’ve delivered this one in full.”

The sometimes tortuous saga illustrates the legal and political pitfalls of trying to regulate toxic chemicals that do not fall into neat categories.

Because hydrogen fluoride is not a classic source of air pollution, it is not regulated in the same way as smog pollutants. In fact, the AQMD was seen as entering uncharted territory nationally in 1991 when it attempted to curb the use of hydrogen fluoride to avoid, not air pollution, but a catastrophic accident.

“It isn’t a compound that you can find national standards for,” said Jack Broadbent, director of the air division for the Southwest region of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a former deputy officer of the South Coast air district.

In the end, the hydrogen fluoride phaseout in the Los Angeles Basin is being accomplished, not with a regulation per se, but by a convergence of other forces: continued pressure by the air district, refinery ownership changes, intense lobbying by residents such as Piseno and heightened concerns about chemical plant safety since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Broadbent called the agreement phasing out the chemical “a model for the rest of the country.” Of the four other major users of hydrogen fluoride in the region, three have closed in the last 10 years, and one -- the Exxon-Mobil refinery in Torrance -- converted to a safer form five years ago under community pressure.

Ownership Changes

The agreement approved Friday was negotiated with Valero Energy Corp. of San Antonio, which bought Ultramar last year.

Ultramar sued the air district 11 years ago to overturn the ban on using hydrogen fluoride. But now, a company spokesman said, Valero has no interest in returning to court.

“We weren’t interested in going down that path,” said Scott Folwarkow, Valero’s director of government affairs. “It’s always better to work collaboratively with the agencies if you can.”

At the air district, Wallerstein praised Valero’s willingness to craft the agreement.

“They deserve credit here for doing the correct environmental thing,” he said.

Few people outside of the chemical industry ever paid much attention to hydrogen fluoride before 1984, when a toxic cloud of a different chemical killed thousands of people and injured thousands more in Bhopal.

South Coast air quality officials started combing through records of chemical plants, hoping to prevent a similar accident here. They were alarmed to find that hydrogen fluoride, used at refineries, could form a cloud with unusual ground-hugging qualities that would be potentially lethal to those downwind.

Acute exposure to hydrogen fluoride can burn and even destroy tissues in the eyes, skin and mucous membranes, and can cause bone abnormalities. Some exposure can be fatal.

Concern grew when a 1987 accident at a refinery in Texas City, Texas, allowed more than 30,000 pounds of hydrogen fluoride to escape, sending more than 1,000 people to hospitals with irritation of the eyes, skin, lungs and other tissues. Less than a month later, 100 pounds of the chemical was released in an accident at the Torrance refinery, but without serious injuries.

Air regulators attempted to ban hydrogen fluoride in the Los Angeles Basin in 1991, only to have the ban overturned in court because of a photocopying error. Five pages had accidentally been left out of an environmental document that had to be circulated 30 days before the air district board voted on the ban.

Although district officials discovered the problem and mailed the missing pages, a judge concluded that the public had not been sufficiently notified as required by state law. The ban was never reinstated.

Wilmington residents lobbied hard in recent months for a phaseout, led by Communities for a Better Environment, a California environmental group that specializes in grass-roots organizing around toxics issues.

Some residents testified before the air district board in September. Piseno spoke out, along with her 11-year-old son, Juan Carlos Piseno, who has asthma. “That gas they were using could leak out. I didn’t want my son to get sick,” Piseno said. She credits Wilmington residents for the agreement.

$30-Million Renovation

Valero expects to spend $30 million to revamp the Wilmington refinery to use the modified form of hydrogen fluoride. It already uses an array of safety measures to prevent a release, such as 26 monitors around the hydrogen fluoride unit.

Some critics of hydrogen fluoride say they wish Valero had eliminated the chemical entirely. But spokesman Folwarkow said hydrogen fluoride is critical for the gasoline-making process and needed to add octane to gasoline.

While researchers are looking at some new technologies, he said, no commercial alternatives are available today.