BP To Spend $400M To Reduce Emissions From Tar Sands Refinery

When BP received approval to re-engineer its Whiting operation in Indiana, intended to refine oil from Canada's tar sands, environmental groups challenged the permits. It turned out that BP's air permit application did not accurately reflect the real emissions from the refinery. As explained by NRDC, one of the challengers:

"The expansion at BP Whiting adds three new flares, but BP's pollution analysis assumed that these new flares would never even be used. NRDC and the other citizen groups alleged in their challenges, and US EPA substantially agreed, that BP had committed multiple errors of this nature in calculating emissions from the proposed expansion to support their conclusion, agreed to by Indiana, that the overall emission increase was too small to trigger modern pollution control requirements under the Clean Air Act."