Chemical plantsPort Neches Plant Rocked by Multiple Explosions, Was Declared High Priority Violator by EPA

By Kiah Collier

Published 28 November 2019

The Southeast Texas chemical manufacturing plant, owned by Houston-based Texas Petroleum Chemical Group, has a long history of environmental violations and been out of compliance with federal clean air laws for years.

The Port Neches chemical plant where two explosions and an ongoing fire prompted widespread mandatory evacuations Wednesday has a years-long history of state and federal environmental violations.

The facility owned by Houston-based Texas Petroleum Chemicals, or TPC Group, which manufactures highly flammable 1,3 butadiene, has been considered a high priority violator by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for more than two years, and been out of compliance with federal clean air laws since the agency’s last inspection in August 2017. State data shows the facility has reported spewing more air pollution than allowed by its government-issued permits five times this year, including hundreds of pounds of butadiene.

Though the exact cause of the fire and explosions, which injured several workers and residents, is still unknown, local emergency response officials said it had been traced to a processing unit that produces the colorless gas, which is used to make rubber and plastics and is a known human carcinogen. The first explosion took place around 1 a.m. The second occurred Wednesday afternoon, prompting mandatory evacuations within a four-mile radius of the plant in Port Neches, Groves, Nederland and northern Port Arthur.

Together, the EPA and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state’s environmental regulatory agency, have fined TPC for air emissions violations more than half a dozen times in the past five years after finding many of the missteps preventable. The last federal censure TPC faced was in 2017 when it was ordered under a consent decree to pay a civil penalty of $72,187, make various equipment upgrades and spend no less than $275,000 on fenceline monitoring for butadiene.

But environmental and consumer advocacy groups on Wednesday said that those penalties — the civil ones add up to less than $200,000 — are nowhere near enough to deter a company that brings in billions of dollars a year from taking sufficient corrective actions.

“When you look at all these facilities and their compliance histories, it’s like a rap sheet,” said Elena Craft, senior director for climate and health at the Environmental Defense Fund. “And of course we see many times these bad actors that continue to have violations and ultimately this can lead to the kind of major disasters like the explosion last night.”

There have been multiple, major fires and explosions at Texas chemical plants in recent years that have resulted in injuries and deaths, particularly in the Houston area. Like with Port Neches, many of the facilities had long histories