Excellence Refined - 30 Years - Valero

In its lifetime, Valero has invested $19.5 billion to improve its refineries. Since
1997, Valero has spent $5.4 billion on regulatory and environmental compliance.
The safety mission continues today. Since 2004, Valero’s
refining system’s total recordable incident rate (TRIR)
average of 0.89 per 200,000 working hours has beaten
industry averages.
Environmental excellence is not only
good ethics, it’s also good business.
——
1996 Valero Summary Annual Report
In the early 1980s, Valero recognized that a worldwide
movement toward cleaner fuels was on the horizon.
Long before most refineries sensed the move toward
reformulated gasoline and emissions controls, the
company was busy developing a strategy to meet
those new demands. As the company has grown, it has
remained at the forefront of this clean-fuels movement.
Twenty-eight years after purchasing the property, Valero’s
largest and most visible commitment to environmental
stewardship is its Corpus Christi Refinery complex,
renamed the Bill Greehey Refinery in 2006. Valero invested
$535 million to construct a refinery that would take the
lowest-grade feedstocks and turn them into premium,
clean-burning fuels. The upgrade was no easy task, but
by its completion in 1984, the refinery aptly produced a
full slate of unleaded gasoline – years before it became
a federal requirement to produce 100 percent unleaded
fuel.
The Clean Air Act of 1990 – at the time, the most allencompassing
piece of legislation in U.S. history – became
law with the hope of improving the nation’s air quality
by tightening fuel specifications. The act mandated the
use of cleaner-burning, “reformulated” gasoline (RFG) in
the nation’s most polluted cities by 1995. But RFG had a
higher oxygen content, which required dramatic changes
to refining processes at significant costs to refiners.
Because of its investments during the previous decade,
however, Valero already was a leader in providing cleanerburning
fuels, both in the U.S. and internationally. In
February 1992, the company dedicated its $290 million
Hydrocracker and Naphtha Reformer units at the Corpus
Christi facility. More than 120 energy industry officials,
dignitaries and media attended, taking tours of the plant
and learning more about the project’s environmental
importance. These units increased the company’s
production of gasoline and gasoline-related products
from 70 percent to 85 percent of total throughput. Years
later, Valero would become the first refiner outside the
state of California to produce and supply California Air
Resources Board (CARB) gasoline, a blend of gasoline
that meets California’s stringent clean fuels standards.
In the mid-1990s, Valero voluntarily added $40 million
in additional environmental initiatives. A marine vapor
recovery unit was added to capture vapors as gasoline
was loaded onto ships and recycle them back into the
refining process, equating to millions of gallons per
year. A Belco scrubber was built to significantly reduce
emissions – more than 40 percent below EPA standards –
and became a staple at many of Valero’s refineries today.
Such voluntary initiatives helped earn Valero the highest
environmental award in Texas, the 1995 Governor’s
Award for Environmental Excellence, presented by then-
Texas Governor George W. Bush.
The Houston and Texas City refineries acquired by Valero
in the Basis acquisition in 1997 were both “grandfathered”
with regard to state environmental permitting laws.
Valero, however, committed to dramatically reducing
emissions from the plants anyway, by installing $60
million in emission-control technology. The upgrades
promised to reduce emissions from the two facilities
Safety & Environmental
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