SWEENY, Texas – During a recent public hearing on an operating permit for an expanding petrochemical complex near this tiny town southwest of Houston, local residents exhorted state officials not to approve the permit for Chevron Phillips Chemical.

Neighbors are concerned about the plant’s expansion because of its poor environmental track record. The State of Texas has issued 93 environmental violations to the plant over the last six years, according to state records.

Riley Bennington, a lifelong Brazoria County resident, got down on his knees and begged the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to deny Chevron Phillips’ request for a renewed operating permit at the more than 70-year-old industrial complex.  

The proposed permit would allow the company to continue operating while it replaces a furnace and produces more ethylene—a raw ingredient in plastics and other chemicals—increasing several types of air pollution, including sulfur dioxide and particulate matter.

Bennington asked officials to consider the health of his mother and 4-year-old daughter, who also live nearby.  

“Whenever you and your agency are making these decisions, they are killing people in my community,” said Bennington, who last year became a field organizer for the Texas Campaign for the Environment.

The town of Sweeney has 3,570 residents and covers two square miles.  That makes the town itself about 50 percent smaller, in terms of landmass, than its largest employer, the Chevron Phillips chemical complex.
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The complex, including the Phillips 66 refinery and a petrochemical plant, jointly owned by Chevron and Phillips, is a sprawling tangle of towers, stacks, and pipes, interspersed with the ever-burning orange flames of flares that consume waste gases.  

Chevon Phillips has for 55 years operated one of the world’s largest ethane “cracker” facilities here, converting (or “cracking”) the components of natural gas into the basic building blocks of plastics. The plant can produce approximately 2.2 billion pounds of plastic resins per year.  

Last year, the company was given the green light to increase production. It is now seeking a renewal of its state operating permit that would incorporate the previously approved expansion project, which includes replacing a furnace and producing more ethylene. The expanded plant would also release more of some air pollutants, including volatile organic compounds, fine particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide.  
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Particulate matter and sulfur dioxide have been linked to long-term heart and lung conditions, and sulfur dioxide contributes to acid rain.  

A previously issued permit also allows the new equipment to increase greenhouse gas emissions from the plant, which contribute to climate change.  

The area around the plant already has much higher rates of air pollution than most of the U.S., according to EPA data. The 3-mile radius around the facility is in the top 14 percent of the country for toxic air pollution and the top 16 percent for drinking water that does not meet health standards.

At the Jan. 14 public hearing in Brazoria, about a 15-minute drive from the plant and Sweeny, company officials described their work as protective of residents’ health and the environment. Plant manager Jose Trevino began by listing examples of all the plastic products people use every day.  

“This is a great example of a project that we are increasing our production to meet customer demand [and] to improve quality of life,” Trevino said.  

The TCEQ hearing drew dozens of residents from all over Brazoria County, a vast and diverse area that extends from the southern suburbs of Houston to the industrial port town of Freeport and farm and ranch country along the Brazos and San Bernard rivers.  

Several local people and environmental activists who live nearby said the hearing was the strongest showing of neighbors speaking out against Chevron Phillips in recent memory. That was largely thanks to Gwendolyn Jones, founder of Climate Conversations Brazoria County, who spent weeks urging the TCEQ to hold the hearing and working to get residents to attend or submit comments.

Jones is one of many Brazoria County residents who trace their lineage to enslaved people forced to work on the many plantations that pre-date the founding of Texas. The Chevron Phillips facility itself is built on a former plantation owned by the Sweeny family.

Ahead of the hearing, Jones drove reporters around the area, pointing out aunts’, uncles’, and cousins’ homes. She said she got involved with organizing against the petrochemical industry and started her group because “this is about Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, and they weren’t aware of what’s going on.”

A record of compliance for the plant can be found in an online database maintained by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which lists 93 environmental violations over the last six years. The agency has imposed about $545,000 in fines against the facility for air pollution violations over the last five years.

The largest of these, a $390,826 fine issued Sept. 8 2021, involved tens of thousands of pounds of emissions over permitted limits in 2017 and 2018. The TCEQ alleges that Chevron Phillips released a total of 37,104 pounds of unpermitted volatile organic compounds and 423 pounds of nitrogen oxides, which both contribute to smog pollution that irritates and damages the lungs. It also emitted 2,422 pounds of carbon monoxide, which is toxic in high enough concentrations.  

In March 2022, Chevron Phillips agreed to make $118 million in equipment upgrades and other measures to settle allegations by the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Justice of repeated air pollution violations at three Texas plants – Cedar Bayou, Port Arthur, and Sweeny. The company also agreed to pay a $3.4 million civil penalty. The company had failed to properly operate and monitor its flares, “which resulted in excess emissions of harmful air pollution,” according to the DOJ.  

The facility also violated its water pollution permit during 2022 and 2023, according to EPA data. For example, between October and December of 2022, the plant exceeded its permit limits for oil and grease in wastewater discharged from the plant by 452 percent. The facility discharges its wastewater to the Little Linnville Bayou near the plant and the Brazos River via a pipeline.  

In 2017, torrential rain brought by Hurricane Harvey led to massive flooding downstream of the plant. Many residents said Chevron Phillips worsened the flooding by damming two bayous and pushing floodwater away from the facility. At one point, nearly 500 residents joined class-action lawsuits accusing the company of worsening flooding at their properties.  

Chevron Phillips maintained that its actions did not cause the downstream flooding. The case appears to be inactive, with the latest filing in October 2023. Court records show many of the residents who sued Chevron Phillips have died since the case was filed in 2017.  
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Roger Pierce, who moved to the area 25 years ago after retiring from the Army, now lives less than two miles from the plant. He’s skeptical that Chevron Phillips will actually clean up its operations, as company officials promised at the public hearing.  

“Are they really going to clean it up?” Pierce said. “Not really. They’re going to mask it.”

About three miles from the plant, a former chemical plant worker, Curtis Smith, said he’s close enough to the facility that the air outside his front door sometimes carries the scent of rotten eggs.

Smith, who worked as a manager at a Dow Chemical plant in nearby Freeport, said he has seen the good side of the chemical industry, because it provided him with a career he looks back on proudly.  But in 2018, Smith’s wife died suddenly after struggling with breathing issues—a result of poor air quality in Sweeny, he thinks.

At an interview at his home, Smith recalled his wife calling from the other room, saying she couldn’t breathe. He called 911 – first one ambulance showed up, then another, then a police officer, who told him he had to leave the room to let them work.  

“While I’m sitting arguing with him, she passed away,” Smith said. “Things haven’t been the same since.”  

Lead photo: Chevron Phillips Chemical's faciliies near Sweeny. Photos by Brendan Gibbons, Oil & Gas Watch News.