On October 18, a much longer Tribune article called the environmental travesty to Chicago’s attention. We learned that British Petroleum is installing new equipment that is tripling the amount of petroleum coke produced by its refinery in Whiting, and that to avoid the most stringent terms of the Clean Air Act, the petcoke is being shipped to storage sites in Chicago. The upshot is that the expansion “will turn the sprawling Indiana plant into the world’s second-largest source of petroleum coke. . . and Chicago into one of the biggest repositories of the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste.” This year the refinery will produce some 2.2 million tons of petcoke, more than three times what it turned out before “the refinery was overhauled to process oil from the tar sands region of Alberta.”
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Tribune columnist Rick Kogan didn’t sound especially cheery when he told me that if the Kochs take over, “I don’t know if anybody has the ideological balls to quit.”
There are some things we can only hope we never find out, and this is one of them.
