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.

When You've Been Had. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

Do Ontarians know when they've been had? It's awful hard to prove.

But.

But.

I would say no—they don’t know it, but the truth is, they’ve been had.

The previous Liberal provincial government, shortly before losing the last election in 2018, had announced that they were raising allowable earnings for clients of ODSP/OW.

(Why in the hell they didn’t just do it, I will never know. But it was exactly this sort of mucky thinking that lost them the election in the first place.)

As I recall, it was something like going up to $400.00 per month from the present $200.00 per month.

At that time, the rate of claw-back against earnings was fifty percent, and that was to remain unchanged. This would have made some small, incremental progress in addressing the #income_crisis

Having won the election, the Doug Ford Conservative government announced a ‘social services review’ of about three or four months. They actually extended that by another couple of weeks. During this time, the author tweeted the premier virtually every day on this subject.

They finally announced that allowable earnings for ODSP would be going up to $500.00 per month, for clients of Ontario Works (welfare), up to $300.00 per month. Sounds good, but the kicker was that the rate of claw-backs on earnings over and above that amount, would now be seventy-five percent.

There was no date of implementation announced, and perhaps this is a key piece of information. 

It was never meant to happen.

I could never find anything on the date of implementation, ladies and gentlemen. I’m a highly-trained Canadian journalist, and I’ve been all over this story—going back many years.

So, November rolls around and there I was, trying to find out the date of implementation…

And then…and then, I stumbled across a very recent Toronto Star article, where they say the whole thing has been shelved. This is the first I’ve heard of that. Yeah, and I made certain important business decisions too, based on the whole idea that those guidelines would have to take effect at some relatively near date in the future. We’ve been getting our raises in November, for example, and this goes back some years.

So now, everything goes back, or rather, stays the same—nothing changes. While the claw-back stays at fifty percent, the allowable earnings also stay at $200.00 per month, and this when ODSP is about thirty-five to forty percent below the poverty line, and OW, more like seventy. Oh, and the people who wrote that article are quoting some quite different figures. 

They say that welfare, at $733.00 per month for a single adult, is fifty percent of the poverty line. I’d like to know where they got those figures, as the poverty line has been well defined by any number of sources, and it’s easy enough to look up social assistance rates. Considering the journalists live in Toronto, it’s quite ludicrous, it really is.

Ah. But.

But.

The government has done something interesting here—they’ve put up a trial balloon. One that appears to have been shot down. One, that it seems, may never rise again…not until the government is ready, that is to say. Two or three months for a social assistance review was never going to be enough time…not when it affects a million of our most vulnerable citizens. 

They may have simply figured that out. They may have known it all along, but the first year of this administration had its own style, one that may perhaps be gone now that it has outlived its usefulness.

Their plan to make it more difficult for the mentally-ill to qualify for benefits, would appear to have also gone out the window. The funny thing is, I never had any problem proving I was crazy—it was the three compression-fractured vertebra they were disputing.

They were convinced I was crazy all right, or maybe I was just a little bit assertive.

(Which they don’t like.)

And now—

The government can be said to have listened to the people. They can be said to appear to have listened to their own base, who honestly believe all poverty stems from moral failure, (otherwise, taxes might be going up), and they can even appear to have listened to those across the aisle of a more liberal bent.

Everyone wins, except those who are affected most—our most vulnerable citizens.

Oh, and it sure sounds to me like we won't be getting that 1.5 % raise, either. You remember--he slashed the three percent raise by fifty percent.

Yeah, there must be a shit-load of ineffectual do-gooders, simply reeling in their effectuality this morning, eh.

And here is the really tricky part.

Maybe we won after all—because it would appear that Mr. Ford and his government still haven’t slashed rates by twenty-two and a half percent, as former Premier Mike Harris and his Conservative government did upon gaining power in 1995. From which we have never recovered, and from which we will never recover.

That’s not to say that they won’t—

But—

I would say that this is a pretty good opportunity for them not to do so—

It’s not like anyone with half a brain is even looking, after all.

No, it’s just me—or us.

This is up to you and me, Doug.

We’re the only ones that seem to care.

END

Poor old Louis, eh. He’s been fighting this lonely battle all this time, but, uh…he has a few books and stories on Kobo.

Image. Stolen from the internet.

Thank you for reading and stuff. January 1 is the tenth anniversary of our independent publishing venture and we’ve been putting some thought into that…

About that Crummy Old Shit-Box. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

If I bought a brand new minivan, it would cost me $33,000.00. If we assume that I would own the vehicle for ten years, that’s $3,300.00 per year, based on purchase price.

I bought a minivan for about $3,300.00. It is thirteen years old. The body was good and it had low mileage. If I own it and then dump it after one year, that’s $3,300.00 per year based on purchase price, and ignoring other costs.

I paid cash for the vehicle. The insurance is running about $65.00 per month. It used to be $85.00 per month, but bundled with tenant’s insurance, the price is twenty bucks or so lower. 

(Either that or the tenant’s insurance, to the tune of one million in liability, is essentially free.)

On the crummy old vehicle, the ‘replacement cost’ in the event of an accident would be $3,300.00, however, I don’t have collision on the vehicle. I don’t have fire, theft and vandalism on the vehicle. This represents a risk—a bet. A gamble.

As long as I’m covered for liabilities, that’s what is important. A shit vehicle is a couple or three grand. Liabilities can run into the millions—

On a brand-new vehicle, one that is on some payment schedule, a bank loan or other financing, one of the terms of the purchase or lease (certainly from my perspective) would be to have ‘comprehensive’ insurance. As a driver, I have forty plus years of experience, no at-fault accidents, no DUIs, and my last speeding ticket would have been about 1998. A perfect driving record, and yet the insurance on a brand-new machine would have to be at least double—say $1,200.00 per year, maybe even more. Maybe even a lot more. The replacement value is ten times higher, we must bear that in mind.

Now, when buying a new vehicle, the interest rates seem pretty favourable—zero percent for the first few years in some cases, from some manufacturers. Then there are bank rates and ‘alternative financing’. Some of those rates seem pretty high—five to seven percent is bad enough. I mean, we are talking $33,000.00 after all. With compounding on unpaid debt. And there is the warranty. A five, six, seven year warranty. My vehicle had no warranty whatsoever. There are times I wish I hadn’t bought it, but I can keep dumping anti-freeze down the hole and try and get my ‘one fucking year’ out of it—put a litre of oil in there once in a while, and just try and ignore the clunking of the stabilizer links and the chirp and squawk of the drive belts.

https://www.greedyrates.ca/blog/understanding-canadian-car-loans/

Am I saving any money, bearing in mind the gallon of anti-freeze going in there each and every month? A litre of oil, every month or two? And what about that halogen bulb I put in there for twelve bucks, or the new rad cap for ten bucks? (And it really didn’t fix the problem.)

There is such a thing as peace of mind. If I was really nuts, I’d put twelve or thirteen hundred into cylinder head gaskets. I’d have them throw a good used radiator in there from the scrapyard, and hell, I might even get another year out of it, unless she throws the belts (noisy fucking things as they are) or I get pulled over in a random safety check or something. But here’s the thing. What if they pull the heads and discover hairline cracks around the combustion chambers due to overheating? (I would still be paying for the cylinder head gasket job. Now, throw in a couple of good used cylinder heads?) I mean, what are the odds. 

The previous owner dumped the vehicle for a reason. And if they got caught out on the highway or something, their first clue that something was wrong would have been that temperature gauge. Either that or steam coming out from under the hood.

A big green puddle, maybe—that was my first indication.

So that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I don’t want to get into it in the first place. If I can keep it going for a year, and then maybe find something else, who knows—maybe I can still sell it to some other poor basterd, for a thousand or fifteen hundred or whatever. To the right buyer, it might make a good ‘winter-beater’ or a work truck, or just a spare or emergency ride or something. The thing only has about 150,000 km on it, and they are known to go to 300,000 or more with proper looking-after.

So, if we throw down $33,000.00 for a vehicle and another $12,000.00 over ten years for insurance, and then follow through with all scheduled maintenance, including tires, brake jobs, tune-ups, etc. on the new machine, we could easily be spending over $50,000.00 to drive what begins as a brand-new vehicle but ends up ten years old and worth about one-third (or less) of the purchase price.

Subtract $11,000.00 from over fifty thousand dollars, do something with depreciation, and this is the true cost of driving the vehicle. This is not taking into account fuel, mileage, or any special accessories or customizations.

Honestly, I wish my math was better sometimes.

END

You guys know I got some really great books and stories on Amazon, don't you?

(He's saving up for another shit vehicle, ladies and gentlemen. - ed.)

Thank you for reading.