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.

The Truth About Global Warming.

Chemical Valley produces one-fifth of the air pollution in Ontario.

by Louis B. Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved
‘Global warming’ is a bad label. Global warming can’t be verified, except over the long term.
And then of course it might be too late.
We’re talking about photochemical changes to the atmosphere.
This includes something on the order of 387 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide.
According to Wikipedia, this is 36 % higher than the 1832 Antarctic glacial core samples which showed that the atmosphere had once held about 284 ppm of CO2. This era is described as more or less coinciding with the industrial revolution. What it does not take into account is other historical perspectives.
During the 13th century, and again in the late Middle Ages, England and Europe were denuded of forests, because of better farming methods and rapidly growing population levels.
Simply put, they cooked and heated their homes with firewood. Many industrial applications used firewood as an energy source. The desertification of parts of Persia, large parts of Asia and India, and the Sahel of North Africa also happened at the same time as pastoral peoples moved in with their flocks and habitations. If you read the Wikipedia article carefully, you will see that the northern and southern hemispheres neither contribute equally to CO2 emissions, nor absorption from natural causes. What this certainly implies, is that data acquired by studies of air bubbles trapped at various levels in Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets may not be true of the globe as a whole. There were clearly regional and seasonal variations in, ‘natural CO2 levels,’ i.e. those emissions not generated by human beings. Other causes include forest fires, volcanoes, etc.
None of this fits into a thirty-second sound bite. It is stated in the article, that in the past, CO2 levels may in fact have been higher than they are now. First, natural vegetation such as trees, meant that the natural solution had already been provided, whereas now all major world forests are under extreme threat from commercial interests. In North America, ninety to ninety-five percent of forest reserves are gone. Secondly, since the dawn of time, CO2 levels may in fact have fallen sharply over geological time-scales. The Earth was all rock and volcanoes at first—it was only when photosynthesis began to take place with the rise and evolution of green plants that the atmosphere began to stabilize into something that could support human life.
If pressed to take a wild guess, I would say that 185 ppm would be more like, ‘normal,’ whatever that means in a geological time scale. This increase happened quite rapidly. It’s accelerating out of control. The trouble with air bubbles in ice-caps, is that the farther down you go, the fewer the bubbles. The sheer weight of ice means no bubbles. At some point you get to bedrock. That’s because the ice has formed since the beginning of an ice age. The record only goes back so far, so we’re only looking at thin slice of time. We need other types of scientific investigation, in order to get a better picture of CO2 levels going back ten thousand years at a time, in ten thousand-year increments, all the way back for six billion years!
Only then will the data make complete sense.
Most citizens accept that global climate change is real. The ones who don’t accept it are all corporate interest groups, interestingly enough; allied with Christian Fundamentalist groups who are opposed to the theory of evolution. It’s like global warming contradicts the Creation, or something. I have to concede, there really is nothing on global warming in the Bible, which is the divinely revealed Word of God.
But if you honestly believe that the world is only a little over 6,000 years old, then all the data is just crazy. Now, if you took twelve Christian Fundamentalists and put them in a jury box, and filled their heads will all kinds of scientific, forensic and psychological testimony, the likelihood is that they would convict any accused person.
Now let’s keep them in that jury box for a moment, and hand them all the evidence; both damning and exculpatory, regarding global warming. What verdict will they come up with?
What about the oil and auto companies? What about the, ‘clean coal,’ and nuclear people?
What’s their objective opinion?
The Canadian federal government seems to be quite schizoid about global climate change, but then they’re just a little bit, ‘off,’ on most things these days. It’s just that they want to sell tar-sands oil to the U.S. so badly. It affects their bourgeois thinking to a certain degree.
All of a sudden we’re having a mild winter, and it’s, ‘global warming.’ Tomorrow it might snow, and this somehow casts doubt on the whole thing. This is not about dubious e-mails of whatever provenance. It’s not about interest groups, and left-versus-right. It’s about the survival of the human race, and every living thing on this planet.
In that sense, it really is a struggle of good versus evil.
The truth about global warming is that we’re living in an ice-age. The fact that our own personal ice-age is somehow different from the last one, (which I admit was a doozie,) makes no difference to the logic. We evolved into our present form during an ice-age.
The glaciers are retreating. No matter what fuzzy teachings you may have retained from your elementary-school science studies, it really doesn’t take two million years for species to evolve. Species can go extinct in fifty years, perhaps less. Hundreds of species in North America went extinct in the course of fifty or a hundred short years of human ignorance; for example journalists with integrity. Those species that did not go extinct in quickly-changing conditions, must have evolved, in a very short time. (If nothing else their behaviour evolved. My logic is irrefutable.)
The human beings around you evolved to their present state since the last big ice age, twelve to twenty thousand years ago. They might go extinct in the next fifty to one hundred years.
It is quite possible the human race will evolve to meet the new environmental niches that open up to them. This will have to happen within the next three to four generations, considering a generation to be about twenty-five years.
I don’t know what that generation of mutants will look like, but surely they will be adapted to high levels of solar radiation, bad water, bad air and bad soil, (and bad coffee.) They’ll be able to tolerate high levels of heavy metals, and radioactive waste in the environment and groundwater.
They will be immune to long-chain molecules closely resembling female hormones in nature and effect, they’ll be able to tolerate long periods of drought, and the paucity of prey items on the menu. They’ll adapt to eat whatever’s out there. They’ll adapt to social conditions such as a lack of truth and accountability, dangerous and out of control governments, rule by small-minded business interests, who can’t see past next qarter’s bottom line. They’ll be adapted to a high-crime environment! They’ll be the only ones left.
The U.S. and Canada recently agreed to tougher new standards for auto emissions. The idea is that it will force consumers to purchase more efficient vehicles, perhaps even electric cars. At one time both Toyota and BMW announced that they would have hydrogen-powered vehicles available in 2010. But it should be noted that mainstream (i.e. ‘tame,’) news reports mentioned the Chevrolet Volt. Interestingly enough, the Canadian government owns about 80 % of GM right now. I haven’t been following too closely as far as the U.S. is concerned, although I do watch CNN. It’s been quite interesting to watch the media systematically bashing Toyota. It’s almost like they have an interest in the outcome—which we all in fact do. They can’t bash BMW’s because they all drive one! It might undermine their credibility. (The big automakes have since paid it all back, at least in the U.S., according to mainstream media. That's because of their fear of change, and regulation. They'll do anything rather than build an efficient vehicle.)
In Canada, the auto workers are definitely members of the bourgeoisie; and of course all the big shots as well. The government has a lot invested in those people. Those people are too fat to starve, apparently, while the disabled aren’t worth bothering with; except when it comes time to slash some red ink and balance the books.
As a philosopher, I applaud the experiment. It’s good to know the corporate plutocrats believe in their vision of social Darwinism. I wonder how fast those guys can adapt. Purely academic, really. Yes; I’m just a hungry little varmint, tearing into the vitals of an aging, decrepit, creaky old dinosaur-carcass. I’m omnivorous, Baby, and real hot-blooded. And I like it.
Looks like bronto-burgers again tonight. It could be worse, eh?