Conocophillips

By next summer, Philadelphia could switch from being the center of the East Coast's oil-refining industry to a historical footnote. ConocoPhillips' announcement Tuesday that it plans to sell or shut down its Trainer, Delaware County, refinery was expected, especially after Sunoco Inc. announced a similar decision three weeks earlier. But that does not lessen the impact of the potential loss of 410 jobs at the 91-year-old refinery that ConocoPhillips has owned since 2002, when Conoco Inc. acquired Phillips Petroleum Co. The shutdown has already begun.

Sunoco Logistics Partners L.P., the unexciting but reliably profitable pipeline subsidiary of Sunoco Inc., is buying two fuel terminals for $156 million that will extend the reach of its supply network. Sunoco Logistics is buying the tank farm at Sunoco's Eagle Point property in Westville, Gloucester County, from the parent company for $100 million. It is also buying a refined-products terminal in East Boston, Mass., from ConocoPhillips for $56 million. The Eagle Point tank farm, next to a refinery that Sunoco shut in 2009, has five million barrels of storage capacity.

An oil refinery employee, sought for allegedly running over his wife at a Wilmington shopping center, held police and fire officials from throughout Delaware County at bay for several hours from atop a refinery tower in Trainer last night. Around 9 p.m., the ConocoPhillips operations manager was taken into custody peacefully by Pennsylvania state police. Authorities said he was not armed when he came down. Delaware state police said the man, identified as Stephen DeJohn, 50, of Chadds Ford, ran over a 47-year-old woman in the Brandywine Town Center parking lot shortly after 2 p.m. in what they described as a domestic incident.

Sunoco Inc. announced a $61 million project yesterday to make a key processing unit at its South Philadelphia refinery safer, a move long sought by community activists and environmentalists. Once it gets the required environmental permits, the Philadelphia refiner plans to install a system that reduces the volatility of an extremely hazardous acid used to produce cleaner-burning, high-octane ingredients for gasoline. Joanne Rossi, president of the Community/Labor Refinery Tracking Committee, which has been pushing since 1991 for a switch to a safer process at the refinery, was thrilled by Sunoco's plans.

A terrorist slams a front-end loader into an oil tank at the ConocoPhillips refinery in Trainer, Delaware County. Crude pours over a dike and floods the Marcus Hook Creek. Soon, a metastasizing, 10,000-barrel spill shuts down the Delaware River. Now what? Luckily, the scenario was fiction, but the reaction was the real deal. Led by the local U.S. Coast Guard unit, more than 300 emergency responders began a two-day exercise yesterday to simulate an oil spill caused by a terrorist attack.