Phillips 66 oil refinery has been Wilmington fixture since 1919
Standard Oil became the first major oil firm to take advantage of Southern California as a refinery location when it opened the Chevron Refinery in El Segundo in 1911. Standard had found the location more advantageous than its Richmond refinery in the Bay Area.
Its competitors wasted little time in following suit. Union
Oil of California, founded in Santa Paula in 1890 and based in Los Angeles, began looking at a site in Wilmington in 1915.
The parcel was situated chiefly on the site of a recent landfill project in the outer harbor at San Pedro known as the Miner Fill. The fill was done to reclaim land for industrial use near the newly minted port, which became part of Los Angeles in 1909.
The advantages of having Union Oil's major refinery near the port were obvious.
The company could move its refined fuel directly to its shipping terminal on the docks, where it could be moved quickly to market.
At the time, the company saw the new operation as a way to increase shipments to customers in South America, then a key part of its business. It already had a pipeline in place that ran from its drilling operations near Brea to the port.
In 1916, the company purchased about 234 acres of land on the Miner Fill and neighboring McDonald Ranch. In January 1917, it officially announced plans to build a major refinery estimated to cost $2.5 million and employ more than 400 workers there.
Construction began that September on the first structure, a temporary office building. Work on the refinery's major structures followed, and the Union Oil Refinery officially went into operation in July 1919 at 1660 W. Anaheim St. in Wilmington.
Fires can be a dangerous fact of life at oil refineries. The Union Oil refinery in Wilmington had its share, including a major one in 1920, shortly after it opened. The company's Brea operations were devastated by a 1926 explosion and fire. As a result of that loss, a smaller refinery was built in Carson. It began operations in 1927.
Another major fire began on Jan. 11, 1951, when one of the refinery's gasoline tanks exploded. The blaze was visible for miles. 16 of the company's 1,000 employees were injured, but there were no fatalities.
The fire shut down the refinery for several days.
During the fire, the Los Angeles Fire Dept. enlisted the help of its Fire Boat 2, the Ralph J. Scott, stationed in the harbor. It pumped additional water from the harbor up to crews fighting the fire for 30 hours.
A year later in October, workers were applying red paint to Tank No. 306 on the tank farm when someone commented that the round-walled natural gas tank now resembled a pumpkin.
The idea resonated, and it only took more paint, this time orange, black and white, to give the giant tank the appearance of a giant grinning pumpkin, an annual tradition which continues to this day. The painted tank even has its own nickname: Smilin' Jack. This year, 2022,
will mark the 70th anniversary of the Halloween tradition.
Union Oil owned and operated its Wilmington refinery, and its Union 76 gas stations, for 78 years. Those years were not without controversy; it was Union Oil that owned and operated the Southern California offshore well Platform A that blew out in 1969, resulting in the environmentally disastrous Santa Barbara Channel oil spill.
Closer to home, the Liberian oil tanker S.S. Sansinena disaster in 1976 occurred at the Union Oil terminal at Berth 46 in the Port of Los Angeles. The explosion and fire killed nine, injured 46 and caused millions of dollars of damage at the port and in the surrounding area.
In 1983, Union Oil changed its name to Unocal Corp. after a corporate reorganization. In March 1997, Tosco Corp. took over the Wilmington and Carson refineries after purchasing them from Unocal, which had decided
to move out of the refining business. Unocal would disappear entirely from the corporate landscape when Chevron Texaco acquired the company in 2005 for $18 billion.
Tosco operated the two local refining entities until 2001, when Phillips Petroleum Co. purchased the company, then the nation's third largest oil refiner, for $6.87 billion.
Phillips merged with another well-known oil company, Conoco, in 2002, forming ConocoPhillips Co. Citing falling profits from refining operations, Conoco Phillips spun off its refineries in 2012 into a separate company, Phillips 66.
That company continues to operate the Wilmington and Carson refineries under the Phillips 66 name. It also operates gas stations under the Conoco, Union 76 and Phillips 66 names in 44 U.S. states.
The Wilmington and Carson refineries, together now known as the Los Angeles Refinery, produce 139,000 barrels of crude oil and 85,000 barrels of gasoline a day, according to the company's website.
In February 2021, Phillips 66 agreed to fix leaks at its Wilmington and Carson refineries, keep an accurate database of the work, fund a treeplanting program at the two facilities and perform other work in order to settle a lawsuit brought by the nonprofit group East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice. The environmental advocacy group had accused the company of failing to do required maintenance meant to prevent toxic gas from spreading into nearby residential areas.
“We are so grateful for the University of La Verne for stepping up to provide such a pathway for our students — they are an ideal alternative,” Brian Marcotte, President of Marymount California University said in the release.
For more information, go to univ.lv/marymountcalifornia.