As Plastic Waste Piles Up In Houston, ExxonMobil Fishes For More Tax Breaks For New Facility, No, Really, They Mean It

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Exxon’s proposal calls for a steam cracker, a facility that uses oil and natural gas to make ethylene and propylene — the chemical building blocks of plastic. Factories like this produce and sell plastic pellets, called nurdles, to other manufacturers who turn them into intermediary or final goods, like bottles and packaging. Besides ethylene and propylene, steam crackers produce climate pollution and hazardous chemicals like ammonia, benzene, toluene, and methanol. “It looks like a big facility,” Alexandra Shaykevich, research manager for the Environmental Integrity Project, which tracks fossil fuel development, said of the plan Exxon has dubbed the Coastal Plain Project. But she said that because much of the application was redacted and the company hasn’t made a public announcement, few details are available. “We’re going to be looking at this one closely.”

Beyond the Formosa plant, Point Comfort is home to a nitrile factory, a plastics facility, and a Superfund site. Several other industrial sites dot the coast around Galveston. Many of them sit alongside communities, and previous analyses have shown that steam crackers in particular are disproportionately sited near marginalized groups. According to an environmental justice mapping tool from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, more than half of Point Comfort residents are people of color, more than half have less than a high school diploma, and more than half of households speak limited English.

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For Wilson, Exxon’s proposal feels like déjà vu. More than three decades ago, the Taiwanese petrochemical conglomerate Formosa proposed its plant, just miles from the Gulf of Mexico, where Wilson’s family had been shrimpers for generations. Her fight against the company started with hunger strikes to protest its permits and eventually became a lawsuit over the exact outcomes she had feared. Wilson and former plant workers joined environmental activists to collect tens of thousands of nurdles from Lavaca Bay and nearby waterways like Cox Creek, and alleged that Formosa had illegally dumped them along with other pollutants. Her $50 million settlement is the largest award in a citizen suit against an industrial polluter in the history of the federal Clean Water Act.

The settlement funded dozens of projects, including cleaning up waterways, and provided $20 million for a fishing cooperative aimed at helping rebuild that battered industry. But Wilson worries another mega-factory coming to the area would undermine that work. “Where Exxon is going to put their bloody plant is smack-dab in front of [what will be] one of the largest oyster farms in Texas,” said Wilson, who is not convinced that any plastics factory can operate without polluting. She noted that Formosa has already violated its settlement agreement nearly 800 times, racking up over $25 million in fines. “Exxon is going to be exactly like Formosa.”

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https://grist.org/accountability/exxon-plastics-plant-point-comfort-texas/