An explosion at a refinery with a history of violations unleashed towering flames and massive plumes of black smoke over Martinez and other cities northeast of San Francisco Saturday afternoon, triggering a local health advisory and a shelter-in-place order.
The Martinez Refining Company quickly received two notices of violations for public nuisance, excessive smoke and soot fallout from the Bay Area Air District. Last year the refinery agreed to pay more than $4.4 million to settle allegations that it discharged millions of gallons of wastewater into marshes in violation of the federal Clean Water Act. But the refinery could have been facing steep penalties after last weekend’s explosion had a bill opposed by its owner passed during California’s last legislative session.
The Martinez facility is owned by PBF Energy, which operates refineries from California to Delaware, and bills itself as one of the largest independent U.S. petroleum refiners and suppliers of transportation fuels, heating oil and other petrochemical products. PBF Energy spent more than $330,000 on lobbying and donated more than $132,000 to state legislators and political campaigns during the last legislative session, 2023 through 2024, a review of state records shows.
Over the same period, the oil and gas industry spent a record-breaking $65.8 million lobbying California agencies and legislators, according to an analysis by Last Chance Alliance, a coalition of public interest groups. Several bills the industry opposed passed, but one, the Polluters Pay Climate Cost Recovery Act, did not.
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The bill would have required fossil fuel polluters to “pay their fair share of the damage caused by the sale of their products.” It would have forced oil companies to help the state and taxpayers offset the billions in damages caused by the devastating Los Angeles fires.
Instead, taxpayers are subsidizing the oil industry. The industry has not only avoided paying its fair share of the recovery costs from climate disasters, it has also benefited from loopholes in California’s tax code that could have generated up to $146 million a year, according to a recent report from The Climate Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit.
“There’s not a whole lot of transparency as to how much the oil and gas industry benefits from the subsidies and tax breaks available to them in California,” said Ryan Schleeter, the center’s communications director. It took the group months of working with the tax board to determine how much the industry avoids paying in taxes through a tax break instituted in the 1980s with the help of former governor Ronald Reagan in the White House.
“But California continuing to subsidize the oil and gas industry is completely counter to our values as a state, counter to our climate goals and counter to public health and safety,” Schleeter said. “And I think lobbying is a great example of the way that the industry uses its wealth and power to maintain its wealth and power, no matter what the cost is to Californians.”
Among the bills PBF Energy targeted was Assembly Bill 1465, introduced in early 2023 to triple air district penalties for refineries that emit one or more toxic air contaminants—which the Martinez facility likely did. Refinery fires typically release multiple contaminants, including volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxide, as well as methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Local authorities believe the explosion was caused by a hydrocarbon leak, which may explain why the officials received several complaints about oil and gas odors before the explosion. Still, an air district spokesperson said, the investigation is ongoing and it’s too early to say what caused the incident.
So far the Contra Costa Department of Public Health has determined that the explosion released more than 500 pounds of sulphur dioxide, a precursor to tiny particles called PM2.5, a major cause of serious illness and death.
PBF Energy did not respond to a request for comment about the contributions or the explosion. A spokesperson for the Martinez Refining Company apologized for the incident at a press conference Saturday and said their priority was keeping the community safe.
Refineries are among the largest sources of air pollutants in the Bay Area, causing shelter-in-place orders and a surge in visits to health care facilities, A.B. 1465’s author, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), wrote in a statement for a legislative analysis. “The consequences for air quality violations must be severe enough to deter a discharge before it occurs, so refineries don’t simply treat fines for causing community disruption as an acceptable cost of doing business.”
Over the 20 months that A.B. 1465 made its way through legislative committees, the oil industry donated more than $1.4 million dollars to state political campaigns, with PBF Energy spending $95,000, state records show. By the time Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill in September, the language for penalties was changed from “shall” to “may be” and any reference to refineries was removed.
“There may, in fact, be an indirect connection between the underlying causes of the massive fire at the PBF refinery in Martinez last Saturday and the sort of lack of penalties or air enforcement that the company’s lobbied for,” said Greg Karras, an expert on refinery pollution who advises workers and residents working toward a just transition to cleaner energy through his firm Community Energy reSource.
The air district has put the refinery on notice for air pollution violations from the latest incident, said Karras, who worked for decades as a senior scientist with Communities for a Better Environment. “They’re not going to be able to penalize them as much as if the [original] bill had gone through.”
And the incident could have been much worse, he said. Because the wind was coming from the southwest, most of the plume blew out over the bay, Karras said. Had weather conditions been similar to those seen during the 2012 Chevron Refinery accident in Richmond that sent 15,000 people to the hospital, he said, “we would have seen a very, very different level of health impact.”
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Liza Gross is a reporter for Inside Climate News based in Northern California. She is the author of The Science Writers’ Investigative Reporting Handbook and a contributor to The Science Writers’ Handbook, both funded by National Association of Science Writers’ Peggy Girshman Idea Grants. She has long covered science, conservation, agriculture, public and environmental health and justice with a focus on the misuse of science for private gain. Prior to joining ICN, she worked as a part-time magazine editor for the open-access journal PLOS Biology, a reporter for the Food & Environment Reporting Network and produced freelance stories for numerous national outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Discover and Mother Jones. Her work has won awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Society of Professional Journalists NorCal and Association of Food Journalists.
