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LEMONT – If you think Citgo is all about putting gas in your car, think again.
Crude oil, and its derivatives, go into hundreds of products, from lipstick and nail polish remover to ink and paint.
Citgo officials shared that information and more about the company’s history and local community partnerships Tuesday when they opened up the refinery to a group of those partners in advance of the Lemont refinery’s 90th anniversary celebration Thursday.
Today, the Lemont facility produces 2.4 billion gallons of finished products each year. Its annual economic impact is $300 million, and the site provides 1,050 jobs. The refinery processes up to 167,000 barrels (42 gallons each) of oil a day, piped from Canada.
Lemont refinery Vice President James Cristman said the facility has its own fire department.
“We have full advanced life support, paramedics and ambulances,” Cristman said, noting that Citgo shares its fire services with local communities through mutual aid.
Patricia Moore, environmental analyst for the Lemont refinery, showed off the refinery’s 1,600-foot-long rain garden in front of its administration building, filled with native grasses, shrubs, trees and flowers, developed in 2011.
“The rain garden is watered through rain and snow melts,” Moore said, adding that it acts as a filter for pollution control. “In addition to being beautiful landscaping, it’s a natural habitat for wildlife – bees, butterflies, dragonflies and birds.”
Visitors were allowed into the limited-access heart of Citgo’s Lemont refinery, the control room, equipped with more than 100 computer monitors, with live video feed, manned 24/7.
“This operation takes care of all the ins and outs of the facility,” said George Papoutsis, manager of process technology at the Lemont facility. “This is where it all happens. We have people outside opening and closing valves, inspecting equipment. We also have folks inside monitoring everything to make sure everything is in the optimal position. There are tens of thousands of monitoring points coming in from the field representing temperatures, pressures, flow rates, which position valves are in, etc.”
Kristin Mulvey, executive director of Resource Development at Joliet Junior College and executive director of the JJC Foundation, was one of the community partners present at Tuesday’s tour. Mulvey thanked Citgo for setting up an endowment providing financial assistance to students working toward technology degrees in operations engineering, process control instrumentation and industrial maintenance, as well as in electrical/electronic automated systems.
“Next month, we will be choosing the first round of scholarship recipients of the Citgo endowment,” Mulvey said.
Citgo also is involved with local schools.
“We’re trying to establish a workforce to join us in the Citgo family,” said Pete Colarelli, the Lemont refinery’s government and public affairs manager. “Every year, we send somebody out to Old Quarry School in Lemont to spend the day with science classes and show them the refining process. It gets kids to think to themselves, ‘Hey, I could do this.’ ”
Citgo makes mostly gasoline and diesel fuel. In fact, most of the gas pumped at any given gas station in the same geographic area likely is from the same source, no matter whose name is on the sign, Papoutsis said.
“The thing that a lot of people don’t know is when you go to a gas station that isn’t Citgo, they still have our gas in it,” Papoutsis said. “It isn’t like only Citgo stations have Citgo gasoline. Citgo has other people’s gasoline, as well. It’s the additives packages that different facilities add that makes the difference. It makes sense – you wouldn’t want to ship the gasoline that’s close to this facility far away, and somebody that’s really far away bring their gasoline here. You just trade.”
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OWNERSHIP HISTORY
• 1925: Operations began as the Lemont Refinery Co., owned by C.B. Shaefer of Chicago.
• 1929: The refinery was sold to Globe Oil.
• 1933: Refinery had doubled in size since its founding and expanded further to accommodate the growing popularity of automobiles, then for aviation fuel needed for WWII.
• 1954: Facility sold to Pure Oil Co.
• 1965: Pure Oil merged with Union Oil.
• 1997: PDVSA, the national petroleum company of Venezuela, acquired 100 percent ownership, beginning operations as Citgo.