CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (PAI)--Following a July accident at a Citgo gasoline refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas -- which left one worker severely injured from a floating plume of toxic gases -- and an union investigation, the Steelworkers are stepping up their national campaign to ban hydrofluoric acid, the chemical that caused the plume.

            The increased campaign, announced in a Nov. 12 telephone press conference of union officials and chemical experts, convened in Corpus Christi, is designed to pressure the major oil companies to switch from using hydrofluoric acid (HFA) to safer ways of producing high-octane gasoline for the nation’s cars and trucks.  

            HFA is used in one-third of the nation’s 150 refineries, USW Texas District Director Jim Lefton said.  USW represents tens of thousands of oil workers, endangered by HFA releases, he said.  

            Besides those workers, communities around refineries are threatened, because HFA leaks produce plumes of toxic gas that can travel as much as 15 miles downwind from a refinery.  Though theCorpus Christi leak hurt only one worker, the plume could have covered a total area -- the city -- housing 340,000 people, Lefton added.

            Other recent HFA leaks were on March 11 in Philadelphia, which hospitalized 13 workers, and on Aug. 2 at an ExxonMobil plant in Joliet, Ill., injuring two. 

            “And on March 30, a tanker truck carrying HFA overturned and spilled it in Wind Gap, Pa.  A town of 5,000 had to be evacuated,” Lefton said.  USW’s drive against HFA began Aug. 31, but is getting into high gear after its analysis of the Corpus Christi leak.

            “The general public does not understand what HFA can do to you, to your community and to your kids,” Lefton said.

            An USW fact sheet spells out those impacts: “Concentrations of HFA of 30 parts per million is immediately dangerous to life and health,” it says.  Lesser concentrations can produce “severe nose and throat irritation and serious lung damage.” 

            Long-term effects, besides the lung damage, can include bronchitis, a combination of weight loss with brittle bones and anemia, called fluorosis, birth defects

-- the chemical experts reported abnormally high rates of birth defects in communities next to Corpus Christi’s 10-mile-long row of refineries -- and permanent eye damage.      

            The campaign will take USW representatives, armed with details and diagrams about the dangers of HFA, to Philadelphia, Los Angeles -- where the local air quality district banned another refiner from installing HFA processes in a Bakersfield plant -- the Midwest and then back to Houstonand Galveston.

            The union has also enlisted the BlueGreen Alliance -- a coalition of unions and environmental groups, led by USW and the Sierra Club -- to lobby the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency and Congress for strong rules against use of HFA, if not an outright ban.  And the independent federal Chemical Safety Board, a non-partisan investigative agency, has weighed in with reports on HFA’s threat.

            Community groups in the Corpus Christi area also tried to make the case by asking EPA to release maps the refiners gave the agency showing HFA hazard areas around the refineries.  The groups’ request was denied, a community rep told the press conference, on the grounds that terrorists could then get hold of the maps.

            To help make its case, in its investigation of the Corpus Christi accident, USW found other alternatives that refiners could use in their processes to make high-octane gasoline.  Those include sulfuric acid and -- in promising experiments -- an inert solid state catalyst that helps produce the high-octane gasoline.  That catalyst, manufactured in New Jersey, is being tried in, among other places, inMoscow, due to a city order.

            Converting HFA-using processes to other processes to make the high-octane gasoline would cost $4 million-$6 million per refinery, panelists said.  “For an oil company, $4 million is like $5 to you and me,” one panelist commented.

            The oil companies -- even those that abandoned HFA at other refineries -- are resisting.  The National Petroleum Refiners Association points to the dangers of sulfuric acid, which does not drift on the wind, but sinks to the ground.

            “The industry is stuck in the mud.  It doesn’t want to change and it doesn’t have a whole lot of sympathy for workers or the community” around refineries, Lefton said.

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