Oil Tank Meeting Airs More Air Quality Concerns

by Brian Slattery The New Haven independent

Laura Cahn: “I think the issue is that these permits were given in isolation to each entity, without consideration to all of the other pollution that exists in our community.” Credit: Brian Slattery Photos

The second energy company this month looking for a permit to upgrade an Annex petroleum facility began the process of engaging the community as required under state environmental justice (EJ) regulations — prompting another round of questions about the impact of the city’s many oil tanks on air quality, smell, and the surrounding community’s health.

The meeting on Thursday evening, for the Massachusetts-based Global Partners LP, went more smoothly than it had for the Texan company Buckeye on Oct. 8. But it also highlighted how current environmental regulations don’t always add up to quality of life.

The meeting took place at the Salperto Community Center on Woodward Avenue in Morris Cove. In attendance were representatives from Global Partners LP and the City of New Haven, along with about a dozen community members.

The focus of the meeting was Global Partners LP’s ongoing efforts to re-permit one of the ten storage tanks it owns at 500 Waterfront St. That terminal currently has capacity to store a total of 714 million barrels of gasoline, diesel, ethanol, and heating oil. The company receives and ships products by land and sea.

Global is looking to re-permit one of those tanks, called Tank 123, to be able to store gasoline in it. If it gets its permit, it will also convert an existing loading arm from ethanol to gasoline service, and install a second, new gasoline arm.

“It’s really to increase the efficiency of the terminal” in handling product and loading it onto trucks, said Tom Keefe, vice president of environmental health and safety at Global. “It’s obviously an advantage to our business, but … through this environmental benefits process, we hope that there’s benefits to everyone.”

Thursday’s meeting functioned as one way for community members to voice their concerns, which would help shape the permit application and the community environmental benefits agreement and subsequent plan.

HannahZoe Chua-Reyes (pictured), sustainability policy analyst and engagement coordinator for New Haven’s Office of Climate and Sustainability, began Thursday’s meeting with an “overview of what environmental justice is.”

As the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) defines it, environmental justice (EJ) dictates that “all people should be treated fairly under environmental laws, regardless of race, ethnicity, culture, or economic status, and should receive equal shares of both environmental benefits and environmental burdens.” Chua-Reyes also quoted the more “activist” definition, from the Natural Resources Defense Council, that “everyone, regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, has the right to the same environmental protections and benefits, as well as meaningful involvement in the policies that shape their communities.”

Those values, Chua-Reyes continued, motivate the creation of a community environmental benefits agreement (CEBA) — an agreement between “the chief elected official or town manager of a municipality and an owner or developer of real property,” Chua-Reyes said. Under a CEBA, the owner or developer agrees to finance offsetting at least some of the environmental harm their business activities may be causing, such as to air and water quality, quality of life, asthma rates, traffic, parking, and noise. Companies often do this by donating to local charities or other nonprofits. State law mandates the creation of a CEBA for businesses operating in designated EJ zones, of which the Annex is one.

This is so because the Annex — zoned for heavy industry, and with high concentrations of it — has very high levels of pollution. Chua-Reyes outlined that it ranks in the 88th percentile nationwide for diesel particulate matter in the air and hazardous waste proximity, and in the 94th percentile for toxic releases into the air and traffic proximity. In other words, as Chua-Reyes spelled it out, only 12 percent of the U.S. population deals with more diesel particulate matter in the air and hazardous waste proximity than people in the Annex do, and only 6 percent of the United States population faces worse levels of toxic release and traffic proximity.

Global Partners LP is going through the CEBA process because it’s re-permitting one of the tanks in its facility in the Annex — Tank 123 — and making a few upgrades. The Fortune 500 company based in Waltham, Mass. has $1.5 billion in capitalization and is “one of the largest suppliers of retail gas stations in the Northeast, going down the Atlantic coast into Virginia and Maryland,” said Sean Geary, the company’s chief legal counsel, which means it has “dedicated storage at 55 bulk petroleum terminals similar to New Haven,” stretching down to Florida and into Texas, with over 22 million barrels of storage capacity. It operates 336 company-owned convenience stores and supplies about 1,700 gas stations.

Global bought its New Haven terminal at 500 Waterfront St. in 2024, Mike Barron, the facility’s terminal manager, explained. Gulf Oil built the terminal in 1926 and expanded it in the 1950s and 1960s. Global acquired it as part of a deal with Gulf involving three other facilities in Massachusetts and New Jersey as well, for $212 million. Today the company has 842 employees in Connecticut, 11 of whom work in the New Haven terminal.

Barron started working at the terminal in 2017, when Gulf still owned it, and throughout his time there, the terminal has “maintained its core purpose of providing safe, compliant fuel storage and distribution for Connecticut and the surrounding region,” he said. It has added tanks, strengthened spill and flood prevention measures, and undergone monitoring by DEEP and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in addition to the staff inspecting the facility twice a day. Barron stressed the several ways that the facility keeps emissions in check, from the tanks’ floating roof design to its vapor reduction systems that capture evaporated gases and reconvert them to gasoline. They don’t allow trucks to idle on their lot while they’re waiting to refuel.

“I’m exposed to more emissions at a gas station than I am at my terminal,” Barron said.

At Thursday’s community meeting.

Attendees — a mixture of public officials, environmental advocates, and neighborhood residents — then grouped up around two tables to discuss their concerns with the terminal and what issues they would like the CEBA to address. They came up with some common themes.

“We had a few discussions about accountability and trying to understand when there are smells, when there are fumes, where is that coming from?” said New Haven City Plan Department Director Laura Brown, whose table had nominated her to speak for their group. “What’s in the air?” asked Steve Winter, New Haven’s executive director of climate and sustainability, speaking for the other table. “We don’t actually know what we’re breathing in the air.”

What are the actual levels of pollution the facility is creating, and what are the health effects on the city? Some residents had noticed an increase in fumes since the pandemic shutdown. “If there’s a smell, do they call this facility? Do they call another facility? Because there are so many terminals in the area,” Brown asked.

There were concerns about deteriorating streets from truck traffic, and about what the protocols were in an emergency, and concerns overall about the sheer amount of emissions sources — from the multiple oil farms lining the shoreline, to the sewage treatment plant. Did they have plans for climate resilience?

There were also ideas for improving the current environment by painting the tanks with reflective paint, or planting trees. The questions hearkened back to a previous EJ meeting on Oct. 8 triggered by a similar re-permitting request by the Texas energy company Buckeye. “You all are one of three applications that are going through the EJ process right now,” Winter told the Global staff.

Chua-Reyes had mediated a discussion with those who had tuned in over Zoom, and came away with similar concerns. Participants had, first and foremost, been struck by just how much air pollution is in the Annex, despite each of the facilities operating within their EPA-mandated limits for emissions. “The air pollution problem doesn’t come down to any single facility necessarily,” Chua-Reyes said. “That doesn’t mean that there cannot be accountability.” It also means “there’s so many different ways we can solve it.”

At the Buckeye meeting on Oct. 8, the assembled company representatives had often been hard put for answers to the public’s questions. Global Partners was different, in particular because of Barron, who offered that, as terminal manager, he does communicate with neighboring facilities and the relevant authorities when he sees a problem; as an example, he talked about a morning he saw a sheen appear on the harbor water offshore from their facility. After determining that there was no leak at his own terminal, Barron talked with his counterparts at other facilities, at last called the Coast Guard, though by the time the Coast Guard arrived, the sheen had dissipated. More urgent matters get a 911 call. Global is also a member of the New Haven Harbor Cooperative, which meets monthly to discuss ongoing issues in the harbor. “We do have a system for communicating with other facilities,” Barron said. If they find a leak at their own facility, they almost always fix it immediately, the occasional more complex problems, he said, have been fixed within three days.

“I will say this,” Barron said of the complaints of smells emanating from the area. “If anybody in this room does happen to catch a smell, just think to yourself, ‘is that smell the same smell I’m picking up at a gas station,” or is it “the smell I’m picking up when they’re paving a road?” Some of the terminals in the area, he said, deal with liquid asphalt, “which has to be heated to flow,” to 3,300 degrees. “If you heat something, you need to vent it,” and observers can tell when that’s happening. “That liquid asphalt tank is going to be a tank that has insulation on it,” and when it’s venting, there is “smoke coming from the top of the tank.” Barron suggested that “nine times out of ten,” when there is a smell coming from the area, “it’s going to be liquid asphalt that you smell.”

The Global staff’s relative preparedness compared to Buckeye made the meeting more collegial. But the same regulatory questions came to bear. Like the Buckeye facility, the Global Partners terminal doesn’t have monitors installed; they aren’t mandated to. So Barron calculates the facility’s emissions based on the volume of product the terminal has on hand, rather than actually knowing what the emissions levels are. As questions continued about emissions, it came out that the permitted levels of emissions are partly determined by the company that built the terminal, based on what its emissions would be if the terminal were operating at capacity. This allowed Laura Cahn, a member of New Haven’s Environmental Advisory Council, to return to the larger point at hand.

“I think the issue is that these permits were given in isolation to each entity, without consideration to all of the other pollution that exists in our community. And so, yes, you have the right to emit” at the level the permit allows, “but when you consider all of the sources” overall, “maybe that’s not a good idea, and I think that’s what we’re saying.”

Comments can also be submitted at https://www.globalp.com/terminals/new-haven/.