Cancer Alley: Huntsman profile

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Huntsman Corporation is a chemical manufacturer. Founded in 1970 and headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas, it expanded by buying up Texaco’s chemicals business in 1994 and Imperial Chemical Industries’ (ICI) chemical business in 1999. (The rest of Texaco merged with Chevron and ICI merged into AkzoNobel). Huntsman became infamous in 1997 after it attempted to clean up an old polymer plant in Odessa, Texas, by setting fire to thousands of pounds of waste chemicals like benzene, butadiene, ethylene and propylene. Community members filed over 3,500 complaints of health problems such as bloody noses, trouble breathing, nausea and sued the company. Huntsman eventually agreed to pay $3 million in compensation to 4,000 individuals.

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In 2002,  two Huntsman managers at the company's petrochemical plant in Port Arthur, Texas, were sentenced to prison for illegally allowing the release of pollutants in the 1990s and the company was ordered to pay a $9.45 million fine. Huntsman was also fined for similar problems at the nearby plant in Port Neches, Texas. This plant was ranked the worst polluter in the U.S. in a recent report for the United Church of Christ by the watchdog group Environmental Integrity Project, and is on the list of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s list of 25 “high priority” facilities in the U.S. that emit ethylene oxide gas at levels that exceeded the agency’s threshold for acceptable lifetime cancer risk. (In 2007, Huntsman sold off the Port Arthur plant to Koch Industries, which and in 2019, Huntsman sold off the Port Neches plant to Indorama Ventures in Thailand.)

Some 130 workers reported sick from 25 releases of toxic chemicals that affected workers inside the Huntsman-operated Rubicon plastics plant in Geismar, Louisiana, over a ten year period – as a result of 56 equipment failures. Government records show the company has never completed inspections of all its facilities in that same 10-year period. A 2019 report showed that Huntsman has 158 overdue inspections on piping circuits and vessels at Rubicon.

(See the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Enforcement and Compliance History Online for Huntsman's Rubicon plant in Geismar. Note that auto-display of data from this link may be disabled for some browsers. If so, copy the URL manually into a new browser window to see it.)

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In 2012, Jon Huntsman, the chairman of the company, decided to run for U.S. president with a pledge to “rein” in the US Environmental Protection Agency, while conversely calling himself the ‘greenest’ candidate of the Republican party. Notably, he was also the only candidate who had personal conflict with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

To learn more about Huntsman, see the CorpWatch Gulliver profile here. A complete list of CorpWatch's Cancer Alley profiles may be accessed here.