Air Quality

In November 2019, the City of Philadelphia published a report titled “A Close Call and an Uncertain Future.” While conveying an image of evenhandedness, the report foregrounded jobs and underplayed air quality impacts. When we interviewed air quality expert Peter DeCarlo of The Johns Hopkins University, he told us that he uses the report in an environmental justice course he teaches as an example of how valid community health concerns get marginalized. The City report normalizes the refinery’s emissions against those citywide, but does not place refinery jobs or economic output in a similar context. It tells the personal stories of workers who may lose their jobs, but not residents who have lost family members to cancer. It also selectively illustrates the data. 

The report breaks refinery emissions into three categories: Greenhouse Gases, the Six EPA Criteria Pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act, and Air Toxics, a long list of toxic compounds like benzene. The report suggests that the refinery accounted for 20% of citywide greenhouse gas emissions: quite significant, but as DeCarlo notes, this figure only counts direct refinery emissions, not the impact of fuels produced there, which amount to 157,000 tons of CO2 per day. Nor does it put the social cost of these emissions in dollar terms, which DeCarlo estimates at $2.4B per year. Similarly, the report downplays the fact that the refinery violated its permit for 5 of the 6 EPA pollutants, highlighting a pie chart that shows it producing only 9 percent of citywide fine particles (PM2.5). But the most egregious omission is the refinery’s share of citywide air toxic emissions: 57 percent, or 500,000 pounds annually of known carcinogens. This statistic is buried in a paragraph text, conspicuously missing from the cheerful green pie charts showing other emissions.[1]

Living within 10 miles of an oil refinery is correlated with an increased risk of multiple cancer types.

More subtly, by focusing only on workers and immediate neighbors in “fenceline communities” within one mile of the refinery, the report suggests that the health burden of the refinery was borne by relatively few, often marginalized residents. While this alone should be cause for outrage, the one mile definition is not evidence-based, and in fact the refinery likely impacted the health of everyone within the city of Philadelphia, and even beyond. In a peer-reviewed study, medical researchers found that living within ten miles of a Texas refinery was associated with a statistically significant increase in risk of all cancer types. In the context of a major metropolis, that radius is huge. While 86,000 residents live within a mile of the refinery, almost 700,000 live within three miles, an area that includes Center City, University City, and all of densely populated South and West Philadelphia. A ten-mile radius encompasses the majority of 1.6 million resident Philadelphia, while twenty miles takes in much of the suburbs as well as parts of Wilmington, the largest city in Delaware. In other words, the refinery was everybody’s problem. 

And it still is. Although the decision to close the refinery was made when Hilco purchased the property, wind down operations continued. In 2021, fenceline monitors still recorded benzene levels at three times the EPA action limit. Potential sources include leaking tanks, hose and pipe connections, and soil contamination. Notably, all three of these sources are likely to remain on the site for some time: soil and groundwater remediation may take years, portions of the site are slated to remain a tank farm, and it sits at a major nexus of pipeline infrastructure. Without vigilant maintenance and monitoring, the “closed” refinery will continue to be a health hazard. Hilco should prioritize both immediate maintenance of remaining petroleum infrastructure and its eventual removal.

Replacing the Refinery with a Distribution Center Doesn’t Fix Things

What about the uses that Hilco proposes replacing the refinery with? Unfortunately, logistics centers are bad for air quality too. The problem is the trucking. Diesel trucks in particular emit large quantities of small, toxic particulate matter that contribute to health problems including cardiovascular disease, cancer, asthma, decreased lung function and capacity, poor reproductive health, and premature death. In many cities, logistics centers, ports, and highways are the focus of environmental justice campaigns. We asked deCarlo whether he thought a logistics center would still be an improvement. He noted two upsides: a major reduction in air toxics—that category of pollutants the City chose to overlook—and distance. Emissions from vehicles tend to fall off more rapidly than emissions from large point sources like the refinery. Unfortunately, vehicle emissions aren’t by nature mobile, and the same densely populated parts of Philadelphia that suffered disproportionately from the refinery are ringed and bisected by major highways on which these trucks will travel. DeCarlo also noted that congestion has a compounding effect on emissions: more vehicles also means more traffic, which means more stopping and starting, and more emissions per vehicle mile traveled.

Rapid progress on the electrification of vehicles and new air quality rules in Southern California may point the way to a less harmful future for logistics. Rather than focusing solely on vehicles, these rules target the warehouses that attract them, with the goal of spurring electrification of trucking and logistics to reduce air pollution. Although the regulatory environment is less stringent and progressive in Philadelphia, the intense public scrutiny of the Hilco redevelopment suggests an opening for imagining a greener and healthier logistics center, one that incorporates electrification but perhaps goes beyond the reduction of harm.