Oil Refinery

Complaints about foul odors from the Petrocon Inc. refinery in Modena prompted the Borough Council to organize a meeting between residents and company officials Tuesday. "We've had numerous complaints about an odor," said council President Clayton Ayers, who said that he, too, had noticed an "oil odor" while driving by the plant. Petrocon, a subsidiary of Safety Kleen, reprocesses used oil at its Union Street refinery. Modena Mayor Fred Martin invited Petrocon's facility manager, Dennis Konnick, to attend Tuesday's council meeting.

Down in the aging, cluttered river towns that form the southern tip of Delaware County, where industry is king and inhabitants live their lives alongside smokestacks and steel, there's a small revolution in the making - a feeling that enough is enough. It began Feb. 13 when a foul odor swept up the hill from a local smokestack, and festered inside a nearby elementary school until teachers and children complained of watery eyes and sore throats. It was a Tuesday, and administrators from the Chichester School District in Delaware County decided that the prudent thing to do would be to dismiss school.

Cleanup work was under way yesterday at the Tosco oil refinery in Trainer, Delaware County, as investigators searched for the cause of Friday's jet fuel tank explosion. The blast, which occurred about 2 p.m. in a tank holding 672,000 gallons of jet fuel, set off a smoky fire that took five hours to extinguish. Firefighters remained at the scene Friday night. They turned off foam-pumping trucks about 9 p.m. after determining there was no danger of another flare-up, Tosco spokesman Patrick C. Prosser said yesterday.

Officials of the Coastal Eagle Point Oil Refinery in West Deptford Township have decided to seek an administrative law hearing to adjudicate $761,000 in fines levied against the company last month for polluting the Delaware River during the last two years. Coastal officials met Aug. 11 with Jorge Berkowitz, director of the state Department of Environmental Protection's water-quality division, to discuss permit renewals for the 1,250-acre plant, but Coastal's environmental manager said the fine was discussed only briefly.

More than 400 Delaware County schoolchildren were sent home until Monday after a foul-smelling gas - identified as sulfur dioxide from a nearby oil refinery - swept through the Marcus Hook Elementary School yesterday. State environmental officials said the gas came from a Sun Refining & Marketing Co. plant 500 feet from the school, where students and teachers have been dogged by mysterious ailments. Only the night before, parents at a school district meeting had angrily demanded that the school be shut until the source could be discovered of odors they said had been making their children sick for weeks.

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.

An explosion in an oil refinery shook the Delaware County town of Trainer yesterday afternoon, starting a fire that burned into the night and sending up a column of black smoke visible for miles. But thanks to warm, windless weather and the efforts of dozens of firefighters, the blast in a jet fuel tank at the Tosco refinery caused no apparent harm - other than one firefighter's twisted ankle. The cause was still under investigation last night. The blaze created a regional spectacle and prompted momentary terror in Trainer, a square-mile town along the Delaware River that is dominated by Tosco and Sun Oil Co. refineries.

Federal and state regulators cracked down on dirty air in the Philadelphia region yesterday, fining a New Jersey oil refinery $3.5 million and hitting a Pottstown, Pa., chemical factory with citations that could mean more than $10 million in penalties. The case against Pottstown's Occidental Chemical Corp., the nation's number-two emitter of a carcinogen called vinyl chloride, represents the first salvo in what could be a long negotiation. It stems from a 13-day inspection earlier this year led by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Sunoco Inc. announced Wednesday it was selling its Frankford phenol and acetone plant for $85 million, the latest asset divestiture by the Philadelphia refiner. The buyer, Honeywell International Inc., says it will keep the 162 employees at the manufacturing facility. "We do expect to add some positions within both the production and supply chain areas, as well as key functional support areas," Honeywell spokesman Peter Dalpe said. Phenol is a raw material used in manufacturing nylon.

Sunoco Inc.'s oil refinery in Philadelphia has at least four potential buyers, and ConocoPhillips has one, and possibly two, offers for its idled Trainer refinery, an oil analyst with an independent trade publication said Monday. "The entire dynamic of the U.S. East Coast markets may be about to change," said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst with the Oil Price Information Service in a note to subscribers. Kloza said bids for the Sunoco plant were due Monday and "multiple sources" in refinery mergers and acquisitions have told him there were "at least four tenders" for Sunoco.

IN BUSINESS A13 A long time coming Sunoco saw itself as in need of a change. That strategy led to its pending sale. Delco's good news Delta Air Lines, hoping to secure a steady source of discounted jet fuel, will buy ConocoPhillips oil refinery in Trainer.

Sunoco Inc.'s oil refinery in Philadelphia has at least four potential buyers, and ConocoPhillips has one, and possibly two, offers for its idled Trainer refinery, an oil analyst with an independent trade publication said Monday. "The entire dynamic of the U.S. East Coast markets may be about to change," said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst with the Oil Price Information Service in a note to subscribers. Kloza said bids for the Sunoco plant were due Monday and "multiple sources" in refinery mergers and acquisitions have told him there were "at least four tenders" for Sunoco.

Devon Crawford was happy to run into some of his old coworkers Monday, but he wished they were meeting a few miles away along the Delaware River, amid the grit and refinery flares. "It's unfortunate that we have to see each other like we're seeing each other," he told them. The occasion was a congressional hearing in Aston Township, Delaware County, on the closing of oil refineries in nearby Trainer and Marcus Hook and an impending shutdown in South Philadelphia. Crawford, the father of boys 10 and 14 who worked as a pump operator at ConocoPhillips in Trainer, is among the hundreds who have lost their jobs.

Wholesale gasoline futures in the Northeast surged Wednesday after a giant oil refinery in the U.S. Virgin Islands announced it was closing next month, the latest petroleum processor to call it quits. Hovensa L.L.C., a joint venture of U.S.-based Hess Corp. and Venezuela's state-owned oil company, announced it will cease operating its 350,000-barrel-a-day refinery in St. Croix. The plant provided 83,000 barrels a day of gasoline and 47,000 barrels of distillate fuel like heating oil and diesel to the U.S. Northeast, according to the Energy Department.

The sun is setting on Philadelphia as an oil-refining center. Unless Sunoco Inc. and ConocoPhillips can find buyers for three plants on the Delaware River, more than half the region's refining capacity will be shut down by summer. Why is this happening now? With gasoline prices creeping upward, how can refiners lose money making fuel? "There may be the point where we've reached peak demand in the United States," said James J. Balaschak, an energy specialist with Deloitte Services L.P.'s Philadelphia office.

DELAWARE CITY, Del. - Wall Street came to the oil refinery here Friday to celebrate with workers and elected officials the reopening of a facility that once was losing $1 million a day. Backed by private-equity firms Blackstone Group L.P. and First Reserve Corp., PBF Holding Co. L.L.C. bought the 190,000 barrel-per-day refinery for $220 million in June 2010. They spent more than a year and an additional $450 million bringing the 5,000-acre site back into service after the previous owner, Valero Energy Co., hurriedly shut the refinery in November 2009.

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.

ZAWIYAH, Libya - Rebel fighters claimed complete control of a sprawling oil refinery in this coastal town Thursday, seizing one of Moammar Gadhafi's most important assets after just three days of fighting and delivering the latest in a string of small victories that have suddenly put the rebels at Tripoli's door. Despite what rebel leaders described as fierce fighting, many of them expressed surprise that the Gadhafi loyalists were routed with relative ease. Some people even wondered whether the chaotic exit by about 50 of the Gadhafi fighters - who fled by boat before they were bombed by NATO warplanes, according to several fighters - was some sort of a ruse.

ZAWIYA, Libya - Dozens of opposition fighters surrounded Libya's last functioning oil refinery Wednesday and laid siege to about 100 government troops, part of a push that brought them closer to seizing this strategic western city. A rebel victory in Zawiya could be a turning point in the six-month-old war and leave Moammar Gadhafi nearly cornered in his increasingly isolated stronghold of Tripoli, the capital, just 30 miles to the east along the Mediterranean coast. Rebel fighters are closing in on the capital from the west and the south, while NATO controls the seas to the north.