It took awhile, but state environmental regulators and Shell Oil finally came to meeting of the minds about a slew of pollution violations committed at the Deer Park refinery.Upshot: Shell will pay a $345,744 penalty for 35 emissions events and record-keeping violations that occurred from 2004 to 2006.
Hair Balls took the time to slog through the paperwork compiled in the Shell investigation and concluded that it’s not user-friendly enough to regurgitate here, unless you have an engineering degree, but if any of you want to take a crack at it, click here.
Suffice it to say, Shell put a lot of a unpleasant stuff into the air and now must pay the piper, so to speak.
It was bad enough that two environmental groups, Environment Texas and the Sierra Club, took an interest in the case.
Shell, at the direction of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, already has taken number steps to fix what went wrong, and for that Hair Balls offers Shell a heartfelt attaboy, but based on past history, we’ve got a feeling we’ll again be hearing about pollution problems in Deer Park before too long.
— Steve Olafson
