After nearly seven-decade run, Santa Maria oil refinery to cease operations by 2023
The better living through chemistry era was in full force in 1955 when Union Oil built the Santa Maria refinery on the Nipomo Mesa.
Dial telephones were still a year in the future for San Luis Obispo.
The flash from nighttime atomic weapons detonations in the desert air above Nevada could be seen in San Luis Obispo County.
Highway 101 was under construction in the county.
In 1955 Riley’s department store announced plans for a brand new building at Chorro and Marsh streets. That building is now slated for demolition; San Luis Obispo just approved a proposal for a six-story mixed use building on the site.
Another era ended this week, too, when it was announced the current owner of the refinery on the Nipomo Mesa is planning on shutting down the facility.
Phillips 66 pumped partially refined oil from what is called the Santa Maria refinery to a refinery in the Bay Area, where it was processed into market ready fuels.
That plant in Rodeo is being converted to a biofuel refinery, converting french fry oil into fuel.
According to an article in Bloomberg Green, a “mind boggling” amount of subsidies are available for biofuel producers.
This leaves as surplus the 45,000 barrel-a-day refinery and chemical plant in Santa Maria in 2023.
In the 1950s Union Oil had big problems to solve. The market for gasoline was exploding, freeways were covering the state and the baby boom was underway.
The Korean War earlier in the decade had stressed the supply chain. Unfortunately the crude oil in California did not refine easily into gasoline.
The company had a lot of California oil, fields near Santa Paula, Bakersfield, Santa Maria and Los Angeles area were all part of the Union Oil inventory, and would soon develop leases in the ocean off Santa Barbara.
According to two company biography books, “A Century of Spirit” and “The 76 Bonanza,” one of the secrets to the company’s success in this era was a new refining process that catalyzed chemical byproducts out of the oil.
The Unicracker could deliver 120 barrels of gasoline from 100 barrels of feedstock.
The process was so good, other oil companies licensed it.
The Santa Maria plant cost $5 million to build, part of a larger $40 million expansion program.
A sister chemical plant was built on site that made coke and removed sulfur from the oil.
Coke is a high carbon fuel used in blast furnaces for metallurgical uses such as steel making.
Union Oil had almost completed construction of coking plant on the Nipomo Mesa, according to a story published in the then Telegram-Tribune, March 12, 1955.
The first member of the staff was due to start work within a week and 90 workers would be hired to run the refinery. The plant was designed to produce about 600 tons of coke a day and handle 21,00 barrels of crude oil, piped in from fields in Santa Maria.
Bechtel Corp. was the contractor and expected to finish work in early April.
Three plants were constructed, a sulfur producing unit, coking plant and utility unit producing water, fuel oil and steam.
The story said some of fuel oil and gasoline would be piped to Avila Beach for shipment by tanker.
The caption on construction photo from Jan 15, 1955, said that nearly 1,700 workers were employed building the plant.
“Some 3,200 acres of unproductive sand dunes are being converted into an industrial plant for manufacturing coke, sulphur and high grade feed stock gas oils for use in big Union Oil refineries in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas.”
According to “A Century of Spirit”, the Santa Maria plant made “popcorn sulfur” by forcing water, air and molten sulfur through a special nozzle. The refining waste product was transformed into a salable agricultural product, less flammable and easier to use than other sulfur products.
For over three generations the plant has provided head of household jobs, ones that will be hard to replace when it closes.
However the hydrocarbon economy has had environmental costs.
The plant has tangled with the Air Pollution Control District over emissions.
The pipelines transporting oil to and from the plant have leaked.
When a major supply pipeline ruptured, the refinery tried to establish supply via rail but statewide environmental opposition to that plan means that the refinery gets raw oil via tanker trucks regularly seen on Highways 101 and 166.
The larger cost of fossil fuels has been the carbon load in the atmosphere, 2020 has seen multiple hot weather records fall as well as catastrophic wildfires and resulting poor air quality from smoke.
A local chapter in that larger story will end with the closure of the plant in 2023.
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A few sentences in this post are from an earlier column published in February 2016.
This story was originally published August 22, 2020 at 12:00 AM.
