Rust Belt Resistance: How a Small Community Took on Big Oil and Won

Chapter 5 Scorched Earth

Chapter 5 Scorched earth In 1996, two parallel but fundamentally incompatible trajectories collided at the Lima refinery. One of them emanated from the agenda of its owners, the corporate executives of British Petroleum. As seen from BP headquarters in London, or through the eyes of American management executives in their beautiful, red granite skyscraper in downtown Cleveland, the logic of international finance and corporate priorities began to point unmistakably toward shutting Lima down. BP had never focused its major energies on refining anyway; instead, its particular corporate genius had always been in finding and producing oil. Now, as profit margins from refining shrank in the 1990s, the logical policy from the corporate perspective was to reduce BP’s refining capacity in an increasingly tough market. As a minor star in the BP firmament, the Lima plant increasingly appeared a prime candidate for closure. This agenda only made sense, however, to those overlooking or ignoring a parallel series of developments occurring at the Lima refinery itself. When their corporate superiors repeated the company consensus that BP’s midwestern refineries were losers, Lima’s managers and workers wondered if perhaps they had been lost in a time warp. Beneath the corporate radar, Lima refinery workers had accomplished a remarkable turnaround, transforming a neglected and declining refinery into a facility that even outside oil industry experts had begun to characterize as one of the most improved and productive in the country. If one trajectory spoke in the language of closure and decline, the other responded in the idiom of revitalization. BP’s corporate executives and the people on the ground at the Lima refinery were locked on a collision course, and their conflict would play out in front of a set of local people whose recent history had rendered them unable to look 101 102 RUST BelT ReSISTAnCe on such struggles dispassionately or abstractly. At stake in this conflict was yet another rendition of the same question the people of Lima had been wrestling with, in one form or another, for the past several decades: whether, in the new global economy, a local community and ordinary people could still imagine themselves as the masters of their own economic fate. Lima’s mayor still thought they could and threw himself into this conflict with all the energy and resources he could muster. Whether these or any efforts could make a difference remained to be seen. “The queen of the fleet” Since 1886, when John D. Rockefeller had directed his brother Frank to purchase farmer Hover’s old bean field south of Lima and begin building an industrial complex there, history had largely been kind to the old Standard refinery. By 1995, while other local firms and entire industries had come and gone, Lima’s facility had been transforming raw crude into gasoline and other products for more than a hundred years. For most of that time, it had remained under the ownership of the functioning remnant of Rockefeller’s core firm. In 1906, amidst thetrust-bustingfervoroftheProgressiveEra,PresidentTheodoreRoosevelthad instructed his attorney general to bring suit against Standard Oil. Even after the U.S. Supreme Court provided the final legal sanction for the breakup of Standard Oilfiveyearslater,theseparatedpiecesofRockefeller’soriginalmassivemonopoly were still large enough to remain major players by themselves in the American oil industry through much of the twentieth century. Standard Oil of New Jersey, for example, metamorphosed into Esso and then Exxon, while Standard Oil of New York gradually emerged as Mobil. The original mother company, Standard Oil of Ohio, or Sohio, retained Rockefeller’s legacy, headquartered itself in his old hometown of Cleveland, and continued to refine crude in Sohio’s two remaining refineries, in Toledo and Lima. Because it lacked its own sources of crude, Sohio’s potential for growth was limited, and it remained a regional refining and marketing company with operations largely confined to the state of Ohio. Even so, it evolved into an adept company with a firm tradition of managerial independence and a dominant position in the Midwest. By the 1960s, with nearly four thousand filling stations across the state, Sohio still controlled about a third of Ohio’s gasoline market, then the fourth-largest market in the country, and the Lima refinery, as one of Sohio’s major facilities, benefited from Sohio’s active attention. In 1970–71, Standard invested $75 million in expanding and improving the refinery, transforming it into one of the largest and best-equipped such plants in the country.1 [18.188.40.207...