Asbestos Exposure in Refineries and Petrochemical Plants

If you worked at an oil refinery or a petrochemical plant — or if someone in your family did — and a mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis, or other asbestos diagnosis has now come in, this page is the place to start. The same dust reached the spouses and children who washed the work clothes, and it didn't matter whether the worker was an operator, a contractor's craftsman, or a laborer, because the whole plant ran on the material.

A refinery wrapped its workers in asbestos by the mile. The process units ran hot and under pressure, so every line, vessel, and exchanger was covered in asbestos insulation, and every one of the thousands of flanged joints and valves was sealed with an asbestos gasket or packing. Keeping it all running meant constantly cutting into that system, an insulator stripping a line a few feet from a pipefitter breaking a flange, and none of that dust stayed with the man who made it: asbestos fibers hang in the air for hours and drift across a unit, so the operator making rounds and the laborer nearby breathed it too. That bystander exposure was real dust, not a trace: even twenty feet from active work the air put roughly a month of ordinary city background through the lungs in a quarter hour. And the turnarounds never really stopped. Units came down for tear-out and rebuild on their own rotating cycles, some every few months, so at a large refinery there was nearly always a unit torn open somewhere, and the plants kept crews who did nothing but move from one turnaround to the next, working in the dust for weeks at a stretch. The chart below shows fifteen minutes of two of those jobs against a year of ordinary city air.

Even ordinary city air carries a faint trace of asbestos, from natural mineral erosion and a century of industrial use, and that trace is the yardstick the chart measures against.

What these numbers mean. Asbestos in air is measured in fibers per cubic centimeter (f/cc), a unit that hides how dangerous a task was. Across this site we translate each measurement into fibers breathed, feet of fiber end to end, and years of ordinary city air, using conservative, government-sourced assumptions. See how we measure asbestos in air for the method and its limits.

You don't need to remember which company's insulation or gaskets were on your units, and you don't need old job records or badge numbers in hand. The bankruptcy trusts that pay many of these claims are built to compensate exactly this kind of work: for mesothelioma, even brief asbestos exposure on a worksite that used it is typically enough to qualify, so you don't have to prove a heavy dose. If you can say "I ran the cat cracker at Exxon Baytown" or "my husband worked turnarounds at Texaco Port Arthur," we have a starting point.

Why refineries were full of asbestos

When a family hears that a refinery career lead to cancer, they usually think of the chemicals: the benzene, the fumes, the things you could smell. But there's another hazard at refineries that you can't smell: asbestos. Asbestos is the proven cause of nearly every case of mesothelioma, and it's a leading cause of lung cancer, too. Asbestos was on the outside of the equipment at every refinery: the insulation covering the pipes and vessels, the gaskets sealing the flanges, the packing in the valves and pumps, and the fireproofing sprayed on the structural steel. A refinery runs on heat and pressure, and for most of the twentieth century asbestos was the material the country used to hold both, so the plant was wrapped in it by design, mile after mile of insulated line.

The insulation makers sold pipe covering, block, and insulating cement into every refinery in the country, and the gasket and packing makers built product lines specifically for refinery service, rated for the heat, the pressure, and the chemicals in the lines. A refinery worker encountered asbestos regularly because the plant was built out of it, unit by unit, and rebuilt with more of it at every turnaround.

And the work that kept the plant running is what put the fiber in the air. Insulation was cut into and stripped off every time a line, exchanger, or valve needed attention, and troweled and wired back on afterward. Every flange that was broken meant scraping or grinding a baked-on gasket off the faces, and every pump and valve that was serviced meant pulling out dried, degraded packing. All of it was old, heat-hardened, friable (crumbly and dusty) material by the time it was disturbed, and tearing out degraded material releases far more fiber than installing it new. The men did that work bare-faced, cleaned up with brooms and compressed air, and went home in dusty clothes to their families, while the companies that made the products knew what the dust was doing.

Where the asbestos was, unit by unit

A refinery wasn't one workplace; it was a complex of units spread across hundreds or thousands of acres, and asbestos ran through all of them. Where in the plant you worked shapes which products you were around, and that's part of what we reconstruct. Here's the tour.

• The process units. Crude and vacuum distillation, the cat crackers, the reformers, the alkylation and treating units: every one of them was a structure of hot, insulated piping, insulated columns and vessels, and flanged connections by the thousand. The unit was the exposure; working on it meant working in and around asbestos insulation and gaskets every day.
• The fired heaters and boilers. The furnaces that heated the process streams were refractory-lined, insulated on their shells and ducting, and sealed with asbestos rope and gaskets at every access door and port, all of it patched and renewed as maintenance.
• The exchanger banks and pump alleys. Heat exchangers were unbolted, pulled, and re-gasketed constantly, and the pump alleys ran on asbestos-packed pumps and valves. Grinding a single old gasket off a flange has been measured at 28.4 f/cc, and a career fitter or machinist did that work thousands of times. See how asbestos gaskets and packing caused exposure.
• The powerhouse and steam system. Every refinery was its own power plant, with boilers, turbines, and steam lines carrying the same asbestos block, pipe covering, and insulating cement found in any utility. Hand-sawing one common asbestos pipe covering has been measured at 51.7 f/cc; both figures live on the product pages that document them. See how asbestos pipe and block insulation caused exposure.
• The tank farm and off-sites. The heated storage tanks, the transfer lines, and the loading racks ran insulated too, and the crews who maintained them worked the same materials as the unit crews, spread across the whole property.
• The chemical side. Petrochemical complexes and chemical plants ran the same pattern as the refineries: steam crackers and process heaters, insulated reactors and columns, and flanged, gasketed, packed equipment throughout, with the added twist that acid and caustic service used asbestos precisely because it resisted the chemicals. A career that moved between the refinery and the chemical plant was the same exposure story on both sides of the fence.
• The turnaround. Every unit came down on its own cycle for inspection and rebuild, some every few months, others every couple of years, and at a large refinery that rotation meant there was nearly always a unit torn open somewhere. A turnaround was weeks of exactly the dustiest work: stripping insulation off entire structures, breaking hundreds of flanges, scraping and grinding the old gaskets, repacking the valves, and putting it all back. The biggest plants kept dedicated turnaround crews on the payroll year-round, moving from one unit to the next, and brought in contractor craftsmen by the hundred on top of them. For many refinery workers, the turnarounds were the career.
• The control rooms and labs. Operators, testers, and lab hands weren't spared by staying off the tools. They made rounds through the units while the insulation and gasket work went on around them, and during turnarounds the whole unit's workforce shared the same air. You didn't have to hold the saw or the grinder to breathe what they released.

Through all of it ran the same multiplier as every heavy industry: the work repeated for an entire career, much of it in congested unit structures where the dust hung between the pipe racks, and none of it done with a warning or a respirator.

The plants, and the companies that ran them

For a refinery or chemical plant worker's case, the plant itself matters for two reasons. It tells us which asbestos products were on the units during which years, and it identifies the company that controlled the conditions the work was done in. Many of these plants were built or vastly expanded at war speed in the 1940s. That means they were insulated throughout with asbestos, and then continued using it for the next forty years. These are a few of the companies and flagship plants where this exposure happened, decade after decade:

• The Gulf Coast refineries. Humble Oil (later Exxon) at Baytown, Texaco and Gulf at Port Arthur, Shell at Deer Park, Cities Service (later Citgo) at Lake Charles, and the Texas City plants, among the largest refining complexes in the world through the exposure era.
• Exxon (Standard Oil of New Jersey). Baton Rouge in Louisiana, one of the biggest refineries in the country, and Bayway in New Jersey.
• Standard Oil of Indiana (Amoco). The Whiting refinery in Indiana, the giant of Midwest refining.
• Standard Oil of California (Chevron). Richmond and El Segundo in California.
• The Pacific Northwest refineries. Shell and Texaco at Anacortes, Washington, on March Point, the anchor plants of Puget Sound refining.
• Sun Oil. Marcus Hook outside Philadelphia.
• The chemical complexes. Dow at Freeport, Union Carbide at Texas City and Institute, West Virginia, DuPont's plants in the Delaware Valley and West Virginia, and the Louisiana chemical corridor plants along the Mississippi.

If your plant isn't on this list, that means nothing about your claim. Refineries, chemical plants, gas plants, and terminals across the country ran on the same products, and our exposure database covers worksites far beyond the famous names. The plant's name, the unit, and the years are the starting point, and we take it from there.

Two things about these companies are worth knowing up front. First, the names changed constantly: Humble became Exxon, Standard of Indiana became Amoco and then part of BP, Gulf was folded into Chevron, etc. Part of what we do is match the name on the gate your family knew to the company that answers for that plant today, and unlike some industries, many of these owners are still in business and still operating. Second, who can be sued over conditions at a plant depends partly on who employed you. A worker on the oil company's own payroll generally can't sue his employer over workplace conditions, because workers' compensation law stands in the way; his case runs against the companies that made the insulation, gaskets, and packing, most of which now pay through bankruptcy trusts. For the contractor craftsmen who worked the turnarounds and construction jobs, it's often the reverse emphasis: the oil or chemical company wasn't their employer, so it can frequently be sued directly as the owner of the premises, on top of the trust claims. We sort out which side of that line a work history falls on, and it changes the channels, not whether there's a claim.

The plants didn't make the asbestos; they bought it, by the mile and by the ton, from the companies that did. The insulation makers sold pipe covering, block, and cement into every refinery in the country, and the gasket and packing makers built lines specifically for refinery service. The manufacturers behind each product, and which of their trusts pay today, are laid out on the product pages. See the makers behind asbestos gaskets and packing, and the makers behind asbestos pipe and block insulation.

Refineries and chemical plants named in the trade press

The asbestos industry's own trade journal, Asbestos, and Johns-Manville's employee magazines wrote about the oil industry as one of their best customers. These articles were written to sell products. Today they help families confirm what was on the lines, vessels and tanks at a plant where someone worked.

In 1932, Asbestos called the oil industry "one of the largest markets for asbestos" and said that "in no other line of industry is asbestos used so widely and so generally" (Asbestos, Sept. 1932). The same article said refinery stills, furnaces, towers, tanks and piping were "usually asbestos insulated" (Asbestos, Sept. 1932), and that pumps, vapor lines and pressure lines had "asbestos insulation, packing and gaskets" (Asbestos, Sept. 1932). A 1935 article described still pipes coated with asbestos paint, joints sealed with asbestos tape and cement, and pumps fitted with asbestos gaskets (Asbestos, July 1935).

Wartime plants used insulation on a huge scale. In 1944 there were forty-one catalytic cracking plants making aviation fuel, with "miles and miles of piping in each plant" (Asbestos, July 1944). The Bayway job came to about 500 tons of insulating material, and the article said those quantities applied "generally speaking, to all similar catalyst cracking plants" (Asbestos, July 1944).

The same products went into fireproofing and gaskets. In 1939 Johns-Manville was adapting Marinite, made from asbestos fibre, for "fireproofing structural steel in oil refineries and chemical plants" (Asbestos, Feb. 1939). Ruberoid's Calsilite-Hi, "combined with asbestos fibres," was offered for fireproofing walls and ceilings in refineries (Asbestos, Sept. 1960). Raybestos-Manhattan's compressed asbestos sheet was sold for flange gaskets in "oil refineries, petro-chemical installations" (Asbestos, Apr. 1968), and as late as 1978 a Houston maker advertised compressed and woven asbestos gaskets "for the petrochemical and refining industries" (Asbestos, Jan. 1978).

Refinery work was a known part of the insulators' trade. In 1953 the asbestos workers' union reported a separate wage rate for "Wood River, Ill. (Oil Refinery only)" (Asbestos, Dec. 1953). In 1981 the magazine reported that a Beaumont, Texas, jury awarded $3 million to the widow of "an insulator at a Texaco oil refinery from 1946 through 1977," who died of lung cancer it said was "allegedly caused by exposure to asbestos" (Asbestos, June 1981).

If your plant isn't listed here, that doesn't mean it was free of asbestos. These are only the plants the trade press happened to write about.

The trades that worked the plants

A refinery or chemical complex employed thousands of men across dozens of crafts, and several of those trades have their own pages, because their exposure followed them across industries. If your loved one's work fits one of these better than it fits "refinery worker," start there:

• Insulators and insulation workers
• Pipefitters and plumbers
• Boilermakers
• All asbestos occupations

For everyone else, the unit operators, the turnaround and maintenance crews, the exchanger and pump men, the tank farm and terminal hands, and the laborers, this page is your page, and the work described above is the exposure story we build the claim on.

Sources of compensation for refinery and petrochemical workers

A refinery or chemical plant worker's recovery usually comes from more than one place, and the different channels run in parallel without canceling one another out. We file across all of them that apply.

• Asbestos bankruptcy trusts. The companies that made the insulation, gaskets, and packing on the units and later went bankrupt set aside money in trusts to pay the people they harmed. These are paper claims that don't require a lawsuit or a courtroom, and a refinery career often supports filings against several trusts at once. For a worker on the plant's own payroll, this is usually the backbone of the case. How asbestos trust claims work.
• Lawsuits against solvent manufacturers. Many asbestos product makers, especially in the gasket and packing world, are still in business and can be sued directly for making and selling products they knew were dangerous. How product liability lawsuits work.
• Premises liability against the plant owners. The oil and chemical companies that controlled the plants can be held responsible for the conditions they allowed, and unlike some industries, many of them are still in business and still operating. This channel is often strongest for the contractor craftsmen who worked the turnarounds and construction jobs, because the plant owner wasn't their employer. How premises liability claims work.
• Federal and disability benefits. These depend on where and how the work was done, and they're paid in addition to the trust and lawsuit recovery. Military service before or after the plant years can support VA disability benefits, civilian work at a federal facility can support FECA (the Federal Employees' Compensation Act) benefits, and Social Security disability is available to anyone whose illness stops them from working. How asbestos disability and benefit claims work.

When a refinery worker's case goes to court, the companies raise the same handful of defenses they raise in most asbestos cases, plus a few tuned to the plants, and none of them is new to us. The short version is that the arguments describe a cleaner, smaller version of the plant than the one your loved one actually worked in, and the evidence answers them. The detail is below for anyone who wants it.

All of this applies only to the lawsuit side of a case. The trust claims are a paper process: no opposing lawyer raises defenses, no one is deposed, and no one goes to court.