Go Deep: What Would Happen if Imperial Oil Left Sarnia? Louis Shalako.

The Sarnia site, the St. Clair River in the background. Photo from CanadianFuels website.

Louis Shalako

“To engage in idle speculation is the mark of a free man.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero.

What would happen if Imperial Oil shut down their Sarnia plant and moved production elsewhere?

This article relies on sheer speculation.

However, there is some evidence, not so much of their intentions, as for an ongoing process.

The company recently took down the big smokestack, visible for some miles when entering the city along Confederation Street.

The old tool crib, machine shop and warehouse building is gone. Old oil tanks, the ones that appeared to have been constructed of large ceramic blocks, are gone. The bottling plant, built in the 1980s, which was meant to bottle the new-at-the-time synthetic oils, is gone. As an employee of a company in the industrial door business, we supplied hollow metal doors and frames for that plant. I knew a guy who drove a big rig. All he did was move trailers around the property—empty trailers go up to the loading dock, full trailers are pulled out and lined up in rows for the ‘real’ truckers who would take them on from there.

The Esso ‘low density polyethylene’ plant, across Vidal Street from the refinery proper, also built in the 1980s, appears to be largely gone—it’s kind of hard to say for sure, from looking at Google Maps, but the street grid, all behind wire and on private property, has some empty blocks. Google Maps isn't always very up-to-date. Those blocks show signs of something being taken away, perhaps storage tanks, perhaps redundant production units. We supplied many, many overhead doors for a train loading dock and factory area. We supplied doors, frames and hardware for the plant. Going on forty year-old memories is not very reliable. It might be better to say that I just don’t know about that one and cannot find any confirmation online.

Imperial Oil has taken out a number of storage tanks, which used to be to the west of south Indian Road. Historically, the company operated a small fleet of tankers, plying the Great Lakes. Nowadays, fuels are mostly transported by rail, by road, or by pipeline.

Now, the provincial government has halted production at the Ineos/Styrolution plant due to high benzene emissions, and just the other day, the federal government issued an order for all Chemical Valley plants to reduce benzene emissions.

The tanks in the centre of the photo are gone...

The Imperial Oil refinery is historical. It is the oldest oil refinery in Canada, maybe even the world, but the focus of those activities has shifted to a large extent to western Canada.

There’s a lot more competition these days. There are also two or three other refineries locally, Shell and Suncor, and the one on Plank Road which used to be Dome Petroleum. Now it is 'Plains-Midstream', whatever the hell that means.

With a large footprint, and a fair bit of open space, a refinery can be rebuilt, it can be upgraded, a newer plant could simply be built on the same property—there is a power generation plant onsite. Those no longer rely on coal, all such plants locally, have been converted to gas. That being said, there is nothing to stop the company from shutting down much of the plant, maybe even most of the plant, and keeping a few such assets in play. The local operation could sell power into the grid, or to other Chemical Valley operations. One, specialized unit could produce one, specialized feedstock for local customers. There was a news story where the Shell refinery was up for sale. I forget the price, something like $250 million. There were no takers—no one wanted it.

Most recently, Imperial Oil announced a rationalization plan, with the result that the Research Centre is shutting down locally, with operations to be transferred to the southern U.S. Their all-weather simulator, built back in the 1980s, where vehicles and lubricants were tested in arctic and high-temperature conditions, (using the new synthetic oil) would now appear to be redundant…it was a source of pride at the time, as was their new synthetic oil product line.

There are signs, the problem is how to interpret them.

It is true, that the plant is close to eastern markets. This is relevant when it comes to gasoline, diesel and jet-type fuels, which are more akin to good old kerosene. It is also true that the fate of Line 5, which crosses the Straits of Mackinac, the State of Michigan, and the St. Clair River, remains up in the air pending court rulings and no doubt subsequent appeals. What would happen to Chemical Valley as a whole if Line 5 was shut down. Bearing in mind the new Nova plant in St. Clair Township will rely on feedstocks from some source, what would happen if any one of their major suppliers were to shut down. That plant represents a $2.5 billion investment or thereabouts.

***

Louis. Going deep on pure speculation. Yet the conclusion is obvious...

Historically, plants and factories have come and gone. Prestolite in Point Edward manufactured electric coils and windings for electric motors and devices related to the auto industry. Holmes Foundry was a subsidiary of American Motors, taken over when AMC became part of Chrysler. When the plant was shut down, the site was mostly dismantled, with the eastern end looking like a post-apocalyptic wasteland with partially-demolished buildings and overgrown with trees and scrub. A friend’s first job was at a place called Mueller Brass, where he was a ‘nipple-polisher’, according to him. The company made brass fittings for the auto and hardware industry.

Fibreglas Canada is gone. The small, old-fashioned plant produced several types of pink and white wool insulation, as well as acoustic ceiling tiles and pipe insulation. Production was simply moved south of the border. The old Polysar, a Crown Corporation formed in early World War Two to produce synthetic rubber, was broken up, with various elements taken over by NOVA, Bayer and BASF to my own recollection. Many of those units have been decommissioned although some industrial operations continue on the site. The Ineos/Styrolutions plant is, in fact, the old Polysar Butyl II and Styrene II plants under new management—and yes, I helped build those plants too.

Dow Chemical decommissioned their Sarnia facility after seventy years in Chemical Valley, although the company has returned to the area with an operation in Corunna.

The Ontario Hydro coal-fired generating plant has been demolished. Welland Chemical, in response to a strike, packed up and left in the middle of the night or so it seemed. The old Ethyl Corporation used to produce lead additives for fuel—a changing regulatory environment pretty much killed leaded fuels, and some other company may have taken over certain assets which may have been useful or adaptable to their own needs. Holmes Insulation was taken over by a Finnish company, and then somebody else, and it’s one of those sites which seems barely active on a casual drive-by.

Coca-Cola had a tiny little bottling plant near the intersection of Indian Road and Confederation Street. The building is still there, behind the Tim Horton’s. The small size gives an easy answer as to why it is gone: it was simply more efficient to produce the product in a larger plant, somewhere else, and truck the product into town (or to a distribution centre), from there.

In light of global climate change, it is simply inevitable that certain refining operations must fall by the wayside, somewhere, someday.

The oldest refinery in Canada might very well be gone in five, ten, fifteen or twenty years. It will almost certainly be gone in thirty.

END

Imperial Oil Research Moving to U.S. (Sarnia News Today)

Imperial to Begin Demolition of Stack. (Sarnia Journal)

Oil Blending and Packing Operation to Close. (Sarnia Observer)

Shell Refinery Sale Plan Scrapped. (Reuters)

Tower Falls at Imperial Oil Sarnia. (Global News)

No Charges for Imperial Oil Despite Massive Fire. (Global News)

Feds Extend Benzene Restrictions for Two Years. (National Observer)

About the author. 

Once upon a time, Louis Shalako worked for Bice Specialties, Wilding Industrial Doors, and Cecco, (briefly), in the industrial doors trade. He worked for C.H. Heist, mostly in industrial vacuum work as well as high-pressure water-blasting. He spent ten weeks on the end of a shovel, hand-digging around pipes and cables, working for Dow Chemical in their Utility/Construction labour force. He worked for Lyndon Security, working a gate at the Shell Marketing Terminal and one or two other places. As an unarmed, uniformed security guard, Louis picked up the weekly mail pouch from Holmes Foundry and took it over the river to the Port Huron Michigan Post Office, which saved the company a day or two on mail delivery. The fun part was, they provided a Jeep Cherokee owned by the company for the trip. (Bridge fare was still fifty cents back then.) As a cab driver, he delivered overtime meals to company gates and drove workers all over the county, after overtime, having missed their car-pool. He worked for Fibreglas Canada for about a year and worked the Cabot Carbon strike as a security guard in 1986. He has been in and out of every plant in the valley as well as many other industrial operations in southern Ontario cities and towns.

 

Louis has books and stories in ebook and audiobook format available from Google Play.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.