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Building History

The Dutch conglomerate Royal Dutch Shell entered the West Coast market in California during the 1910s, and rapidly became an aggressive driller and marketer of oil and gas products. This large refinery was built in the port city of Martinez early in Royal Dutch Shell's expansion into the state. Adam Romero has said of Shell at the time: "In the early 1910s, Royal Dutch/Shell stormed into the California oil market. In 1914, its subsidiary, Shell Oil Company of California, completed a state-of-the-art refinery at Martinez, and by 1916, Shell's West Coast operations had become fully integrated from well to consumer. In 1922, Shell bought most of the Union Oil company as a way to Americanize Royal Dutch/Shell's California operations and protect Shell from the political harassment that it suffered as a 'foreign' company during World War I. By the mid-1920s, an average Shell Union Oil Company well in the Central Valley produced a million cubic feet of dry gas and 250,000 cubic feet of wet gas per day, all of which was simply vented into the atmosphere." (See Adam M. Romero, Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture, [Oakland: University of California Press, 2022], p. 126.)

Shell's American subsidiary, Equilon Enterprises LLC d/b/a Shell Oil Products US, sold the 106-year-old Martinez facility in 2020, selling the processing plant to PBF Energy, Incorporated, of Parsippany-Troy Hills, NJ. This sale was first announced in 06/2019, but was finalized by 02/2020. it said in a press statement: "Equilon Enterprises LLC d/b/a Shell Oil Products US (Shell), a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell plc announced today that it has formally closed on the sale of Shell’s Martinez Refinery in California to PBF Holding Company LLC (PBF), a subsidiary of PBF Energy, Inc., in exchange for $1.2 billion which includes the refinery and inventory. The deal also includes crude oil supply and product offtake agreements, and other adjustments." (See Royal Dutch Shell.com. "Shell finalizes sale of Martinez Refinery," published 02/01/2020, accessed 11/04/2021.)

PCAD id: 24226