HOUSTON — Oil refineries, petrochemical plants and gas compressor stations across Texas exceeded pollution limits in late January as below-freezing temperatures blasted the state.
Industrial companies reported at least 77 emissions events to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality from Jan. 22 to Jan. 29 — a period covering before and after Winter Storm Fern.
Environmental groups and community advocates say Texas lawmakers and regulators haven’t done enough to prevent emissions events from spiking during winter weather events. Some companies with emissions releases during Fern were also big emitters during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, said Grace Tee Lewis, a senior health scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.
“We need to have a better system of accountability for bad actors who are consistently having releases that are unpermitted,” Tee Lewis said.
Counties like Martin County and Midland County in West Texas and Jefferson County and Harris County in the eastern part of the state were among those with the highest number of events.
The tally from Fern and is likely to grow after more cold weather hit Texas last weekend. In the eight days before the storm led to increased industrial disruptions, TCEQ data showed fewer than 30 emissions events were reported.
TCEQ allows pipeline operators, refiners and petrochemical facilities to request state enforcement discretion for violations that happen in an area covered by a natural disaster declaration made by the governor.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, issued a disaster declaration on Jan. 22 before expanding the declaration to cover 219 of Texas’ 254 counties on Jan. 25.
Companies must submit an initial notification within 24 hours after the discovery of an emissions event that goes above a “reportable quantity,” TCEQ spokesperson Laura Lopez said in a statement. A final report is due two weeks from the event of the event, she said.
“TCEQ reviews these events against criteria located in the Texas Administrative Code to determine if the event was avoidable and assesses whether or not operators took measures to minimize emissions,” Lopez said. “Based on the results of an investigation of a reportable incident the TCEQ may pursue enforcement actions when appropriate.”
Texas’ emissions uptick also comes as the Trump administration has worked to slash regulations. EPA proposed in September to eliminate the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which requires oil and gas suppliers, refineries and petrochemical plants to report their annual emissions.
President Donald Trump’s EPA also postponed a Biden-era rule requiring states to come up with plans to monitor natural gas — or methane — emissions from oil and gas infrastructure and requiring operators to upgrade their equipment to reduce leaks.
Also last year, EPA said it was reconsidering a Biden rule designed to better protect communities from accidents at facilities like refineries and chemical plants. If that rule and others are rolled back, that would mean taking a step backwards in terms of progress on air quality, said Inyang Uwak, research and policy director at Air Alliance Houston.
“We’re going to be losing all of the gains we’ve made over the years, that we have worked hard to strengthen regulations rather than roll them back,” Uwak said.
EPA did not provide a comment when asked about policy changes during the Trump administration.
Most of the failures across natural gas networks, refineries and petrochemical plants are due to a lack of pipeline insulation and winterization, said Faisal Khan, chemical engineering department head and director of the MKO Process Safety Center at Texas A&M University.
Uninsulated pipelines can allow the natural gas traveling through them to become denser when temperatures go below freezing, Khan said, and pressures in the pipelines drop. That creates two issues, he said.
First, operators can’t purge the natural gas to get rid of impurities like excess oxygen, moisture and debris due to the cold. Second, facilities that accept that denser gas — including compressor stations, storage tanks and booster stations — are trying to process the gas at lower pressures than the infrastructure was designed to handle.
What goes wrong
In their reports to TCEQ last month, multiple natural gas facility operators said issues arose because the natural gas they received contained impurities. That included the LenorahGas plant in Martin County, operated by an Energy Transfer subsidiary.
Energy Transfer did not provide a comment last week on the Lenorah plant to POLITICO’s E&E News.
“What happens is something goes wrong on a midstream facility and everything upstream of that just blasts out in the air — it becomes over pressured,” said Sharon Wilson, director of the environmental group Oilfield Witness, which uses optical gas imaging technology to track emissions.
Wilson has posted on her LinkedIn page about emission events following Fern.
Some operators told TCEQ in their emissions event reports that storage tanks’ hatches remained frozen open during the winter storm, which resulted in the tanks venting gas into the atmosphere.
Chevron reported multiple emissions events from its Bryant gas facility in Midland County, with the facility emitting nearly 70,000 pounds of natural gas volatile organic compounds over more than two days, according to TCEQ records.
In a statement last week, Chevron spokesperson Allison Cook said the company does not comment on the status of facility operations.
“The safety of people and the environment is our highest priority,” Cook wrote. “Throughout the weather event, we followed our winter weather action plans to enable safe, reliable and sustainable operations.”
Moisture can get into a range of process equipment — and freezes can cause instruments to break and prevent equipment from getting a temperature or pressure reading, said Sam Bailey, senior manager of industrial innovation at the Clean Air Task Force.
For petrochemical plants and refineries, uninsulated pipes can lead to chemical temperatures dropping, which can alter the physical properties of the substance, Texas A&M’s Khan said. He compared it to a home’s water line and what would happen if it wasn’t insulated.
“The water will not remain water, and it will become ice and fracture the whole pipe,” Khan said. “In the refinery, if I’m carrying the lighter hydrocarbons or the gases which are prone to change in density — similarly, it could pop [the pipeline].”
Pemex’s Deer Park refinery, for example, emitted nearly 52,000 pounds of sulfur dioxide over more than 14 hours starting late Jan. 25, along with more than 856.2 pounds of highly toxic hydrogen sulfide. Operators told TCEQ that “some of the refinery systems suffered process issues due to frozen conditions and inclement weather.”
Pemex did not respond to a request for comment on the Deer Park facility.
Refiners and chemical plants focus severe weather plans of the safety of their employees and of surrounding communities, said Hector Rivero, CEO of the Texas Chemistry Council, a trade group for the petrochemical and refining industries.
“During extreme winter storms, some industrial facilities may experience brief increases in emissions as they take necessary emergency measures to protect workers, equipment, and nearby communities,” Rivero said in a statement. “These temporary emissions are well-regulated and a normal part of safely shutting down and restarting complex manufacturing systems under severe weather conditions.”
Both natural gas and petrochemical and refining operators can help prevent issues by wrapping insulation over all exposed pipelines, Khan said. But doing so could cost companies hundreds of millions of dollars to protect for only a couple of weeks of freezing weather Texas gets annually, he said.
Texas as seen major complications from past winter weather, including Winter Storm Uri in 2021 that disrupted natural gas supplies, knocked out power for days and killed more than 240 people.
“We understand this is an economic challenge to invest so much to protect for only a week or two weeks of time in the overall 12 months, but not investing can actually cause catastrophic issues,” Khan said. “If we haven’t changed our system after having learned from what happened in the 2021 freeze, then we are simply ignoring it. It’s waiting for another fiasco before we start to realize, ‘No, we can’t let this continue.'”
In a paper published in December in the journal ACS ES&T Air, Environmental Defense Fund researchers said that compared to non-weather-related upsets at facilities, incidents tied to weather “were associated with higher emissions.”
‘Excessive’ events
The initial number of emissions events reported in Fern’s aftermath is smaller than the final 243 emissions events tied to Winter Storm Uri in 2021 and 112 emissions events associated with Winter Storm Elliott in 2022.
Some emissions event reports from Elliott and Uri weren’t reported to TCEQ until four months after the storms, TCEQ data shows.
But even when companies report emissions incidents, some research suggests it’s rare that they’ll face fines or be required by TCEQ to take action to prevent future issues.
A study by the Environmental Integrity Project found that between 2016 and 2022 some 119 out of 21,769 — or 0.5 percent — of emissions events were categorized by TCEQ to be “excessive.” That triggers an enforcement action that requires companies to determine the cause and submit plans to prevent problems in the future.
Over the same period, the report showed, there were 1,634 emissions events that lasted longer than a week, almost none of which were labeled as “excessive” by TCEQ.
The study also found TCEQ rarely imposed fines for emissions events, and when they did, the amounts were small. One facility in Victoria, Texas, reported 420 emissions events to TCEQ from fiscal 2017 to 2022 and was fined a total of $21,575 in that time.
Critics also say regulators have done little to require natural gas supply facilities, refineries and petrochemical plants to weatherize after Winter Storm Uri.
The majority of the emissions events associated with Winter Storm Fern came from natural gas infrastructure, TCEQ records show.
Lopez, the TCEQ spokesperson, said enforcement discretion allows the agency to “balance immediate needs like electric reliability and disaster response without compromising long-term oversight.”
“By applying enforcement discretion on a case-by-case basis during declared disasters and power emergencies, TCEQ continues to fulfill its core mission of protecting public health and the environment,” Lopez added.
The Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, created a new rule that required critical natural gas facilities to weatherize. Critical natural gas facilities include infrastructure that provides electricity generators and homes with natural gas.
While the original proposed weatherization rule included specific changes operators would need to make to comply, the final rule did not include any specific actions for natural gas operators, said Virginia Palacios, executive director of the Commission Shift nonprofit watchdog group.
Specific actions, instead, were put into a guidance document. An investigation by POLITICO’S E&E News after Uri found that the Railroad Commission rarely issued violations for its weatherization rule other than for paperwork issues — and that inspectors rarely went into the field to verify operator-submitted reports.
“As it turns out now, the Railroad Commission isn’t really enforcing any kind of weatherization standard,” Palacios said. “There’s no bare minimum operators have to do for weatherization to be effective.”
In a statement, Railroad Commission spokesperson Bryce Dubee said that the agency’s inspectors conducted more than 7,400 inspections for weatherization in fiscal year 2025.
“Because of their efforts, the Texas natural gas supply chain remained stable throughout [Winter Storm Fern], delivering critical fuel to homes and power generators,” Dubee wrote.
Emissions that occur during system upsets due to extreme weather can happen for a variety of reasons, including “needed safety measures,” Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, said in a statement.
“These are kept to a minimum, and facilities are required to follow protocols in compliance with regulatory entities,” Staples said Thursday. “It is critical that these discussions are rooted in operational realities.”
Staples said parties across the natural gas supply chain have invested to “harden” infrastructure as they pursue “optimal performance’ during extreme weather events.
Critics also say little was done to require weatherization at refineries and petrochemical plants, which fall under TCEQ’s jurisdiction.
TCEQ did not respond when asked if the commission had passed any rules or made any regulatory changes for chemical plants and refineries to weatherize after Winter Storm Uri.
Rivero with the Texas Chemistry Council said in a statement that the industry has applied significant lessons learned and strengthened their systems, which put them in a better position to weather storms like Winter Storm Fern.
“Winterization reduces risk, but it cannot change the fundamental chemistry and physics of industrial processes that require pressure relief, temperature stabilization, or controlled combustion during abnormal operations,” Rivero wrote.
Still, Tee Lewis with the Environmental Defense Fund questioned the lack of regulatory changes for refineries and petrochemical facilities after Uri. She pointed to sweeping changes that were made to the state’s oversight of electricity generators, including specific weatherization requirements and a host of other changes.
“There were a lot of changes after Uri with the grid, and they saw those natural gas-related effects,” Tee Lewis said. “I’m wondering if that was just low-hanging fruit that they kind of attacked first, and [regulators] have not gotten to the petrochemical industry.”
Webb reported from Houston. Anchondo reported from Washington.
