Pruitt, Wehrum, Other EPA Heads Moved Heaven & Earth To Help Now-Bankrupt Philly Refinery
Former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and other top agency officials were closely involved with reviving a private equity-owned oil refinery that went bankrupt last year and is now shutting down after a fiery explosion last week.
In January 2018, the month the refinery company Philadelphia Energy Solutions went bankrupt, Pruitt and EPA leaders held three previously unreported meetings with or about PES, agency documents show. The last meeting — organized by a lobbyist with ties to Trump administration EPA appointees — was on a Sunday afternoon, the day before it went belly up. In the days and months after the bankruptcy, Pruitt organized four additional briefings on PES, which at the time was primarily owned by the Carlyle Group.
The culmination of those discussions was an EPA settlement in March 2018 that waived half of the refinery's outstanding renewable fuel standard blending credits — a deal worth some $175 million to PES. It helped the refinery emerge from bankruptcy, although perhaps only briefly. Yesterday, PES CEO Mark Smith announced the company would close the refinery in the wake of last week's explosion and fire that destroyed part of the site to prepare the "complex for a sale and restart" under new ownership (Greenwire, June 26).
But EPA leaders' coordination with PES — through at least 10 meetings on the waiver and earlier Obama-era efforts — raises questions about how far the agency will bend the rules to prop up the century-old refinery again, according to legal experts. The closure could put more than 1,000 people out of work and might mark the end of fuel processing at the site along the Schuylkill River that has stored oil products since 1866.
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