Explosion Highlights Risks of Wall Street Chemical Plant Ownership: 2019
Image of the November 27, 2019 explosion and fire at the TPC Group chemical plant in Port Neches, Texas.
The day before Thanksgiving 2019, a chemical plant operated by the TPC Group and owned by the private equity firm SK Capital exploded in Port Neches, Texas.
The explosion spewed contaminants that forced over 50,000 people to evacuate, leaving the community with the lingering aftereffects of an industrial disaster.
The chemical plants SK Capital owns in Texas have a long record of environmental violations, not just at their TPC Group factories, but also with other SK Capital portfolio firms.
According to EPA data, SK Capital-owned chemical plants in the Houston area increased greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 20 percent between 2014 and 2019.
The pollution from these plants disproportionately burdens communities of color and lower-income areas. This toxic footprint of private equity aligns with the longstanding environmental injustice of siting chemical and petrochemical plants in these neighborhoods, especially along the Gulf Coast. At least 225,000 people live within three miles of SK-owned plants in the Houston area, where 70 percent of the population is Latinx or Black and nearly half (49 percent) lives below the poverty line.
The private equity industry currently owns or has stakes in approximately 175 chemical companies across the United States. The Port Neches explosion was the second private equity-owned petrochemical plant disaster in less than six months.
In June 2019, the Carlyle Group-owned Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery exploded in South Philadelphia, injuring five workers. Because the private equity owner is largely shielded from downside risks of bankruptcy or environmental disaster, it can extract value from the target firm, even at the cost of its long-term productivity or sustainability. [#50]
To what extent was our economy designed to be fair?
To what extent was our economy designed to be fair?
Enter your email to receive a copy of your notes.
You can also review your notes in-browser for the next 24 hours.
Dispossession of Land
from Indigenous Peoples:
1607 – Present Day
Wall Street Established
as an Official Trading
Post of Enslaved Peoples:
1711
Invention of the Cotton
Gin Accelerates the
Expansion of Slavery:
1794
Choctaw Nation Forced
to Abandon Ancestral
Lands for “Indian
Territory”: 1831
Lehman Brothers’
Cotton Exchange: 1858
Sharecropping and Debt
Peonage: 1870s-1940s
Prison Labor:
1870s - Present Day
Railroads and Chinese
Laborers: 1880s-1890s
Tulsa Black Wall Street Massacre: 1921
Stock Market Crashes, Ushering in the Great Depression: 1929
LA Police "Repatriate" Mexican Americans and Immigrants at La Placita Park: 1931
The Home Owners Loan Corporation Develops Redlining: 1933
Report on “Pinklining” Reveals How Wall Street Targets Women for Toxic Loans: 2016
