Amid pressure from neighborhood groups and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, BP later this year will halt shipments of dusty petroleum coke to Chicago sites across the border from its giant Whiting, Ind., refinery.
A BP spokesman on Wednesday confirmed that by mid-year the company will stop sending petroleum coke to two sites along the Calumet River owned by KCBX Terminals, a firm controlled by industrialists Charles and David Koch. But BP would not say where its high-carbon, high-sulfur material will end up instead.
The company’s sprawling Indiana refinery is the world’s second-largest source of petroleum coke, or petcoke, a byproduct of the Canadian oil boom that is piling up in huge mountains across the Midwest.
“If necessary for business reasons, BP may consider using limited Illinois-based storage options on a short-term basis if those options are compliant with state and local regulations,” Scott Dean, the BP spokesman, said in an email. He declined to elaborate.
For more than a year, Chicago residents in the East Side and South Deering neighborhoods have complained that the Whiting petcoke is handled differently depending on where it’s stored.
Under the terms of a federal legal settlement, BP is required to enclose petcoke at the Whiting refinery to keep lung-damaging dust from blowing into surrounding neighborhoods. But KCBX hasn’t been required to comply with the same stringent regulations at its Chicago sites — something that Emanuel pushed to change in response to complaints about gritty black dust blowing off the uncovered piles.
Community groups also angrily complained about dump trucks rumbling through the neighborhood between the BP refinery and two KCBX sites, one off 100th Street and another off Burley Avenue between 108th and 111th streets. BP later shifted to moving its petcoke by rail.
Emanuel has vowed to drive petcoke storage operations out of town. During the past year, the city required more aggressive efforts to tamp down dust, imposed limits on the height of uncovered piles and set a 2016 deadline to fully enclose any large quantities.
Earlier this week, the Chicago Department of Public Health rejected a KCBX request to delay building a giant storage shed at the Burley Avenue site for up to 14 months past the city’s deadline.
“BP’s decision to stop shipping petcoke to Chicago validates our strategy to make the city a less appealing place for storing petcoke,” the mayor’s office said in a statement.
Environmental groups cautiously welcomed BP’s announcement.
“Petcoke is nasty wherever it ends up,” said Henry Henderson, Midwest director of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. “It is critical that the Southeast Side’s problem doesn’t just get shifted to somebody else’s yard in an unsuspecting community.”
While it is losing a high-profile customer, KCBX still plans to dramatically expand its storage of petcoke from other refineries in Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota and Wyoming. “We plan to continue competing for our customers’ business,” said Jake Reint, a KCBX spokesman.
Before KCBX drew the ire of community groups — and eventually Emanuel — state officials had cleared the way for the company to handle up to 11 million tons a year of petcoke and coal at the Burley Avenue terminal. Of that amount, about 2.2 million tons would have come from the Whiting refinery.
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