BP Broke State Law to Get Refinery Air Permit, Lawyers Say

Nov. 25 (Bloomberg) — BP Plc broke Texas’s “revolving door” law in 2003 by hiring a state environmental engineer to work on the same air-quality permit he’d supervised as a regulator, lawyers suing the company say.

The permit, which governs BP’s Texas City, Texas, refinery, allowed the company to operate its largest refinery without replacing outdated emissions controls, such as the one that exploded in March 2005, killing 15 workers. Texas law requires applications be rejected when the people involved worked on both sides of the permitting process.


The engineer “changed sides and worked on the other side of this same thing for BP, representing BP against the state?” a lawyer for some of the injured workers asked Watson Dupont, a safety manager at the Texas City plant in a Nov. 15 deposition, portions of which were made public in court filings Friday.

“He worked for BP in 2003 on the third draft of the flex permit, yeah,” Dupont replied, referring to BP Senior Air Engineer Rueben Herrera, a former permitting engineer at Texas Council for Environmental Quality. The group regulates industrial emissions.

BP today denied any improprieties in its air-permitting process.

Bloomberg