"Lake" Of Oil Sludge, Lead, PFAS Up To 16 Feet Thick Under CA Refinery Set To Close: Who Will Clean It Up?

One of Los Angeles County’s most polluted stretches of land will soon be cleared for new development, and a full accounting of the ground’s degradation will be left largely to an oil company. For almost 40 years in the middle of the 20th century, workers at an oil refinery with connected facilities in the neighborhood of Wilmington and nearby city of Carson buried truckloads of slop oil and acid sludge directly on site. Decades later, much of that waste is still in the soil and water table, state records show.

Phillips 66, which now owns the century-old refinery, will idle the plants by the end of the year. In some areas, the contaminated underground layer is more than 16 feet thick. Yet the only estimates for how much it will cost to tear down the refinery and clean up the fouled land is from Phillips 66, which blamed “market dynamics” for its closing. “It is a huge problem that there is currently no disclosure requirement concerning the actual cost,” said Ann Alexander, an environmental policy consultant and principal at Devonshire Strategies. So much waste has accumulated under and around the refinery, it has formed a subterranean “lake of hydrocarbons,” she added. It could take decades to address.

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In the meantime, years of groundwater testing by regulators reveal a toxic legacy. Among the pollutants in the groundwater under the Carson and Wilmington facilities, overseen by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, are lead from buried waste and dangerous levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from foam used to fight fires at the refinery.

None degrade naturally and will likely have to be contained underground, said Danny Reible, a professor of environmental engineering at Texas Tech University who has advised governments on such cleanups. It is “effectively impossible to remove 100%” of such pollution, Reible said. Some contaminants have leached into aquifers that are a source of drinking water. Since 2023, more than five different samplings by Phillips 66 found elevated levels of tert-butyl alcohol, a gasoline additive, in a groundwater monitoring well in a neighborhood about half a mile from the Wilmington site.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22082025/phillips-la-refinery-closure-cleanup/