Viewpoint: It's Time for a Major Shakeup at the Martinez Refinery After Saturday's Massive Fire

Despite progress last year, refinery officials have failed to restore the public trust that was shattered in 2022 and 2023. It is time for them to leave and for PBF Energy to pay a steep price

Note to readers: For the latest updates on Saturday’s fire, click the following link: https://martineznewsandviews.substack.com/p/breaking-news-fire-breaks-out-at

The following represents my personal viewpoint based on my experience as a longtime neighbor of the refinery and the extensive reporting of its operations over the past two-plus years by Martinez News and Views.

For much of 2024, it seemed that officials at PBF Energy’s Martinez refinery might have turned the corner following a series of troubling accidents and incidents that started with the toxic “spent catalyst” release over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in 2022. But those hopes went up in the dark, black smoke of Saturday’s major fire that triggered a rare shelter-in-place order, and now it’s time for the community to say enough is enough and demand a major shakeup at the Pacheco Boulevard facility that is surrounded by homes, schools and medical facilities.

Refinery manager Daniel Ingram appeared at cordial City Council meetings throughout 2024 trumpeting the renewed focus on safety at the refinery and data showing that incidents had plummeted in recent months. It was a stark contrast from the scene at a council meeting in December 2023, when Ingram and his management team were lambasted by council members and the public following back-to-back incidents that capped a problem-plagued 13 months. Far from restoring trust following the fiasco of the 2022 spent catalyst incident in which the refinery failed to detect the toxic release of heavy metals into the air and alert the public, confidence in the refinery was steadily shattered in the year that followed as unplanned flaring and other incidents continued at a steady clip.

It all boiled over the final month of 2023 when Contra Costa Health (CCH) launched an unannounced inspection of the refinery to try to get to the bottom of any problems in its safety culture, with CCH Executive Director Anna Roth issuing a sharply worded letter decrying an “unacceptable number of hazardous materials releases and other incidents” at the refinery and making clear that “CCH will not tolerate unsafe business practices at the refinery.” The refinery, in turn, promised that it was “working hard to regain the trust of public officials and Martinez residents.”

And for a while, it appeared to be succeeding. Ingram, who initially took a defensive posture following the 2022 spent catalyst release in talking up the refinery’s safety record, acknowledged the need for improvement and presented quarterly updates to the City Council with glossy PowerPoint slides showing progress.

"If a slide was up there for health and safety, what you would see is a bunch of zeros, which is excellent," Ingram told the council last April during his quarterly update. "We had zero employee recordable injuries, zero contractor recordable injuries, and zero Tier 1 process safety events.”

And that trend largely continued for the rest of the year, with the exception of loud, unplanned late-night flare in September that was promptly stabilized. Unlike the end of 2022 and virtually all of 2023, the refinery’s operations seemed to fade to the background of community discourse with each month that passed without major incident. Helping matters for the refinery’s public relations push was an independent safety culture assessment that found no glaring red flags in its operations but rather areas for improvement along with documented strengths.

The refinery’s run of positive news continued with the settlement of a lawsuit with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) in which PBF agreed to meet stringent new emissions standards without having to install a costly “wet gas scrubber” that had been the focus of ongoing debate. The refinery convinced BAAQMD officials that it had developed new technology to achieve the same reductions in particulate matter without the scrubber, which had heretofore been described as the only current technology capable of meeting the new limits.

As 2025 neared, refinery officials prepared for a major “turnaround” maintenance project at the refinery that would include the refinery’s fluidized catalytic cracking (FCC) unit, which was responsible for the November 2022 spent catalyst release and where the debate over the proposed gas scrubber was centered. Ingram told the council last April that the project would "one of the largest, if not the largest, turnaround … under PBF for sure, maybe the history of the site, in terms of total scope, manpower and activities that will be going on."

Now the question becomes whether the scope — and complexity — of the turnaround project was connected to Saturday’s massive blaze, and whether the steps needed to meet the new particulate emissions limits required by BAAQMD without installing a gas scrubber played any role. An incident report from BAAQMD said the fire occurred in the Light Oil Processing area of the refinery, which according to refinery documentation found online, is where the FCC is located.

In a sad repeat of the lack of transparency it showed immediately following previous incidents, the refinery dodged questions by the Bay Area media on Saturday night about the exact location of the fire on its property — something it clearly was aware of.

Before Saturday’s fire, PBF had already triggered five lower-level alerts through the Community Warning System since Jan. 4, according to CC Health’s newly launched hazardous materials notifications dashboard, far more than any other refinery in the county. This previous string of alerts also raises questions about whether the refinery was struggling to execute this large turnaround project and whether the alerts were warning signs of a major accident to come.

Of course, the public is being told what it is always told after mishaps large and small at the refinery — answers will be provided in due time (which usually turns out to be much longer than anyone thinks is acceptable). But at this point, no answers can satisfy the basic question of how this event could possibly occur given the intense scrutiny of its operations over the past two years and internal and external attempts to correct all the problems that had so shaken the Martinez community.

Regardless of what is ultimately found to be the cause, one thing is clear. There is no way for PBF’s current management team in Martinez to restore the trust they had promised in December 2023, and it is now time for them to leave.

It gives me no joy to say that. Ingram and his team, whom I have observed at many public meetings over the past two-plus years, have struck me as sincere and earnest in their desire to fix the problems at the refinery (though his initial defenses of the refinery’s safety record after the 2022 Thanksgiving release were troubling, and, as is typically the case in such circumstances, they always appear much more transparent and forthright about the nitty gritty of refinery operations when things are going well than when things would go awry — something that has been repeated over the past day).

Saturday’s fire makes clear they have failed to right this wayward ship, and there’s no way for them now to preserve their credibility in the community or any semblance of faith that they can run a safe refinery.

PBF’s corporate leaders must step in and clean house in Martinez, and not just by shuffling around managers from other facilities operated by a company that had a poor reputation for refinery safety well before the events that started on Thanksgiving night in 2022. U.S. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier directly questioned PBF’s corporate culture when it comes to safety during a refinery town hall he hosted last March, and it appears now he was exactly right to do so.

PBF must be forced to spend big money to bring in outside, independent refinery safety experts to take control of the situation. It’s that simple.

If they drag their feet or refuse, Contra Costa County, regional and state regulators should do everything in their power to make PBF’s corporate life a living hell. They should launch non-stop investigations and inspections, issue fines that have real teeth to them (unlike past ones that PBF has dismissed in its corporate shareholder filings as having no material effect on the company’s bottom line), and turn the company into a community pariah until a major shakeup and needed changes take place.

That means that local officials and community groups need to stop aiding the refinery in its public relations campaigns to generate goodwill. No more partnering on city cleanups; no more refinery-sponsored runs for education. Yes, the refinery has contributed significant sums of money to the community over the years, but if it truly cares about our community, it can still write those same checks, without draping them in high-profile community events and photo ops. Both the city of Martinez and the Martinez Unified School District should immediately suspend all community-based partnerships and relationships with the refinery in the wake of Saturday’s fiasco. It should be made clear to refinery officials that any financial or philanthropic contributions they offer to the community will not be met with public acknowledgement, let alone the community glad-handing that they and we have become accustomed to.

Make no mistake about it. A Level 3 Community Warning System event that triggers a shelter-in-place is a very big deal and very rare. While refinery-related incidents will inevitably occur from time to time — given the nature of the beast of operating a complex hazardous materials facility — there is absolutely no excuse for events of this magnitude. When a similar fire broke out at the Chevron refinery in Richmond in 2012, the resulting fallout and crackdown on that refinery was intense, with the federal Chemical Safety Board launching a major investigation that led to major changes at the refinery. The same needs to happen in Martinez, regardless of whether the CSB decides to step in.

Meanwhile, we’re sure to hear the same simplistic reactions from many in our community on both sides of the refinery divide that we’ve become accustomed to after past incidents — the trite demands to “shut it down” answered by those who insist on reminding us that we’ve always been a “refinery town.”

The bottom line is that neither attitude is practical or helpful. There is simply no realistic mechanism to shut down the refinery, and even if there were, the economic pain to not only workers but low-income residents already struggling with high gas prices would be immense. It wouldn’t even necessarily be the win-win from an environmental standpoint that people might assume. California already lacks adequate refining capacity to produce the special blends of gasoline required under the state’s stringent environmental laws, requiring such blends to be shipped in from refineries in other states — shipping that causes its own environmental and safety concerns and risks. That situation already figures to grow more acute with the planned closure later this year of a Southern California refinery, leading to fears of price gouging as ever fewer refiners control the California gasoline market.

Closing the Martinez refinery without an adequate plan to make up for the lost refining capacity — if such a plan is even possible — could cause gas prices to skyrocket, most impacting vulnerable populations that are already reeling from the effects of high inflation and the housing crisis. Not to mention that it would further erode the few good-paying blue-collar jobs still left in the region at a time when working-class families are finding it more challenging than ever to make ends meet. The UC Berkeley Labor Center recently released a report documenting the economic pain felt by over 750 workers at the nearby Marathon refinery who lost their jobs in 2020 after that plant was idled as part of its transition into a renewable fuels facility (it has had its own safety problems, including a 2023 fire that severely injured a worker, since reopening).

Meanwhile, the typical social media chatter from refinery defenders about Martinez’s history as a “refinery town” and reminding us that the “refinery was here first” are not relevant and border on the silly. Being a refinery town or being here first doesn’t excuse the refinery from endangering public health and safety; that much should be obvious. The refinery not only supports the community with its tax dollars; the community also supports the refinery by purchasing the products it produces and supplying its workforce. And let’s not forget that the tax revenues the refinery generates are at least partially offset by the effect its very presence has in depressing property values — and by extension property taxes — in neighborhoods that abut it, not to mention the strain it places on public resources such as fire, police and health, as we saw with the “all hands on deck” response from taxpayer-funded agencies to Saturday’s fire. This is a two-way street, folks, and right now it’s the community that is getting run off the road.

So no, the refinery is not going to shut down because of Saturday’s fire, and no, it’s not going to get a free pass by way of its history in Martinez and the tax dollars and community giving it generates. There needs to be a response to this disaster that matches the gravity of what occurred Saturday, which far surpasses in significance anything we saw in 2022 and 2023, but one that also reflects reality.

The first step in the long road that the refinery will have to travel to try, yet again, to regain the public trust it spoke of 14 months ago — if that’s even be possible under its current ownership — will be a simple one. That’s for the people currently running the show there to bid farewell. They had their chance — multiple ones in fact — and they failed to deliver.