The world’s ‘dust bin’
Pollution-choked India buying dirty U.S. oil byproduct
U.S. oil refineries that are unable to sell a dirty fuel waste product at home are exporting vast quantities of it to India instead.
Petroleum coke, the bottom-of-the-barrel leftover from refining Canadian tar sands crude and other heavy oils, is cheaper and burns hotter than coal. But it also contains more planet-warming carbon and far more heart- and lung-damaging sulfur — a key reason few American companies use it.
Refineries instead are sending it around the world, especially to energy-hungry India, which last year got almost a fourth of all the fuel-grade “petcoke” the U.S. shipped out, an Associated Press investigation found.
In 2016, the U.S. sent more than eight million metric tons of petcoke to India. That’s about 20 times more than in 2010 and enough to fill the Empire State Building eight times.
The petcoke being burned in countless factories and plants is contributing to dangerously filthy air in India, which already has many of the world’s most polluted cities.
Delhi resident Satye Bir does not know all the reasons Delhi’s air is so dirty, but he says he feels both fury and resignation.
“My life is finished ... My lungs are finished,” said the 63-yearold Bir, wheezing as he pulls an asthma inhaler out of his pocket. “This is how I survive. Otherwise, I can’t breathe.”
Laboratory tests on imported petcoke used near New Delhi found it contained 17 times more sulfur than the limit set for coal and a staggering 1,380 times more than for diesel, according
to India’s court-appointed Environmental Pollution Control Authority. India’s own petcoke, produced domestically, adds to the pollution.
Industry officials say petcoke has been an important and valuable fuel for decades, and its use recycles a waste product. Health and environmental advocates, though, say the U.S. is simply exporting an environmental problem. The U.S. is the world’s largest producer and exporter of petcoke, federal and international data show.
“We should not become the dust bin of the rest of the world,” said Sunita Narain, a member of the pollution authority who also heads the Delhi-based Center for Science and the Environment. “We certainly can’t afford it; we’re choking to death already.”
Embracing tar sands
For more than a century, oil refining has served as a lifeline in America’s industrial heartland, where thousands of manufacturing jobs have been lost in recent decades.
In gritty northwest Indiana, a sprawling oil refinery and steel mills dominate the Lake Michigan shoreline. Freight trains chug through working-class neighbourhoods. And smokestacks and distillation towers still symbolize opportunity.
Local officials and workers cheered when the BP Whiting refinery invested US$4.2 billion so it could process crude extracted from tar sands in the boreal forest of Alberta, Canada.
U.S. refineries embraced tar sands oil and other heavy crudes, when domestic oil production
was stagnant before the hydraulic fracturing boom. Some of the biggest built expensive units called cokers to process the gunky crude into gasoline, diesel, ship fuel and asphalt, which leaves huge amounts of petroleum coke as waste. When BP Whiting’s coker in Whiting, Ind., was finished in 2013, its petcoke output tripled, to 2.2 million tons a year.
Petcoke traditionally was used in the U.S. to make aluminum and steel after its impurities were removed. But when those mills closed or moved to other countries, the need for petcoke waned, although some power plants still use it. Other industries that had burned petcoke in the past did not want to invest in costly upgrades to control emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, so they shifted to cleaner natural gas.