DEP Hopeful a Buyer Will Emerge to Keep the ConocoPhillips Refinery Open

Susan Phillips

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Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

February 14, 2012 | 5:58 PM

Paul J. Richards / AFP/Getty Images

A worker delivers gasoline to underground tanks at a Sunoco gas station in Arlington, Va. Richards / AFP/Getty Images

There’s still no word on any prospective buyers for the idled ConocoPhillips oil refinery in Delaware County. The company plans to demolish the facility if no sale happens by the end of March. And yet, the Department of Environmental Protection remains hopeful that the plant will find someone to take over. The DEP renewed the plant’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit today.

“The renewal of this permit continues to protect an important environmental asset, the Delaware River Estuary,” DEP Secretary Mike Krancer said in a press release. “Also, even though the facility is currently idle, this permit renewal is a necessary and critical step in putting the refinery in a position to be acquired by a new operator, which we hope will happen.”

The closure of the ConocoPhillips refinery, along with the neighboring Sunoco refinery, will cost the Philadelphia region 1200 jobs. A lobby day in Washington, D.C. is planned for Wednesday. Two hundred workers say they will tell lawmakers that the closures will not just cost them their jobs, but also create a shortage of home heating oil and gasoline in the Northeast. They plan to demonstrate outside of the headquarters of ConocoPhillips and Sunoco.