Houston-based TPC Group has spotty environmental record.
TPC Group has a 75-year history in Port Neches and the Port of Houston dating back to World War II, when petrochemicals boomed along the Gulf Coast to manufacture synthetic rubber for tires and other products to support the war effort.
The Houston-based company also has a spotty environmental record in recent years, although there haven’t been many incidents with serious injuries until Wednesday’s explosion at the Port Neches plant.
The company’s history includes its transition from a publicly traded company operating under the name Texas Petrochemical to its current private structure and ownership by private equity firms with operations in Texas and Louisiana.
In 1944, the legacy plants in
Port Neches and Houston were opened by two different companies, Neches Butane Products Co. and Sinclair Rubber, respectively.
The company Texas Olefins bought the Houston operations from Texaco in 1984 and changed its name to Texas Petrochemical. In 2006, Texas Petrochemical bought the Port Neches campus from The Woodlands chemical company Huntsman Corp.
In 2010, the company changed its name to TPC Group and, two years later, it was acquired and taken private in a partnership by the New York private equity firms First Reserve and SK Capital Partners, which still own TPC today.
TPC mostly manufactures a variety of intermediate products such as butadiene and methyl tera-butyl ether, called MTBE, which are then used to make end products, including rubbers, fuels, plastics, lubricants and surfactants.
MTBE is primarily used as a gasoline blending additive. Butadiene is used to make synthetic rubbers. Butane from natural gas liquids produced from Texas shale fields and elsewhere is heated in a process called cracking to make butadiene.
The Port Neches plant is a large producer of butadiene and MBTE. It accounts for more than 16 percent of North American production capacity and 12 percent of MBTE production capacity, according to ICIS, a petrochemical market research firm. Knocking the plant temporarily offline could boost prices for the chemicals and benefit competitors, such the Houston company Lyondell-Basell.
Within the last five years, the facility was fined more than $100,000 for Clean Air Act violations. The company was also required to spend $275,000 on a fence-line monitoring system to track and record the level of butadiene in the air.
Earlier this year, TPC was fined $214,000 for excessive emissions and pollution — including a failure to report incidents — by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The Houston campus was noted for releasing excess volumes of nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and various volatile organic compounds.
Last year, a storage tank caught fire at the TPC Houston facility, but there were no injuries.
As with many refining and petrochemical companies, TPC Group had issues and major emissions releases during the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Boilers in Port Neches were shut down and large volumes of toxic carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides — way beyond the legal limits — were released through flaring.
The facility is currently not compliant with the Federal Clean Air Act. It violated the Clean Air Act 12 of the last 12 quarters according to records from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
In 2015, TPC was fined more than $45,000 for emissions events in Port Neches.
Asked during a news conference Wednesday morning abourt the company’s environmental record, TPC manager of safety, health and security Troy Monk said he didn’t have any knowledge of past fines or TCEQ investigations regarding emissions standards. Monk said he could not comment on the plant’s compliance.