Cancer Alley: Marathon profile

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Marathon Petroleum is a fossil fuel company headquartered in Findlay, Ohio, that was created by the merger of three companies Marathon Oil (previously Ohio Oil Company), Ashland Refining and Tesoro Refining. The merged company is the largest producer of refined petroleum products in the United States, with 16 refineries across the country including the Galveston Bay Refinery in Texas and the Garyville Refinery in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, two of the three biggest refineries in the country.* The Michigan and Louisiana refineries are located in major industrial zones with dozens of other polluting facilities and have been protested regularly by local communities who have suffered serious breathing problems and high cancer rates. In 2020, Marathon agreed to pay out $360,000 for air pollution at the Detroit refinery while several workers were hospitalized in a major explosion at the Garyville refinery in February 2022. Additionally the Texas City, Texas, refinery experienced a large oil leak from a storage tank as well as a hydrogen fluoride leak in 2021 that injured several workers. 

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(See the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Enforcement and Compliance History Online for Marathon Garyville Refinery in Reserve. 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.)

In 2016 Marathon was fined $334 million by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and ordered to install modern upgrades to prevent air pollution and refineries in Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, and Ohio, and $275 million over the same issues in 2001. Tesoro (which was a separate company at the time) was also fined $425 million for air pollution at its refineries in 2016. Marathon has also been fined $187 million for failing to pay transit fees for the Tesoro High Plains Pipeline that runs under the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. The company got the fine reduced to $3.9 million by the Trump administration but the local tribes continue to fight for a better settlement.

* in 2022

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