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Client: Beaumont, Texas
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Cleaner, bigger and growing is our trend
BY Dan Wallach, The Enterprise
Clean air compliance. Yet another industrial project, bringing the total to at least $15 billion. Rich with opportunity.
If all this news was fatty food, Southeast Texas would have surpassed a healthy Body Mass Index.
Cup runneth over? Let's consider the ways.
I was amazed that Southeast Texas actually reached compliance with the federal Clean Air Act. This is an issue I've followed since 1989 when industry and the South East Texas Regional Planning Commission first created their Air Quality Advisory Committee.
Its goal was to someday reach compliance, but its monitoring data, month after month and year after year, showed dirty air would trip up one of the air samplers placed around Jefferson, Hardin or Orange counties.
Ozone is elusive, forming when just the right amount of emission combines with the right amount of heat and sunlight. It's bad for people and irritates lungs. It especially hurts little kids and their grandparents.
I often thought that compliance was about as realistic as winning a rigged carnival game.
While it's true that the Environmental Protection Agency will announce a new and stricter standard for ozone later this month, the region could have an easier time making it, an EPA official said last week.
The key to staying in compliance is a good maintenance program, said Carl Edlund, the EPA's air quality program director at its Dallas regional office.
It's a tall order because so much new industrial capacity will locate here.
Motiva Enterprises' Port Arthur refinery will go to 600,000 barrels of capacity per day by early next decade. Total Petrochemicals is expanding as is Valero Energy Corp.'s Port Arthur refinery, which will be the area's second-biggest at 415,000 barrels per day.
At least two liquefied natural gas terminals are under construction, and a third could be announced this year. A new Eastman Chemical Co. plant to be built in Beaumont will use what's left over from crude oil refining to produce hydrogen, methanol and ammonia as well as other chemicals.
I can hear astronomer and "Cosmos" author Carl Sagan in my mind: "Billions and billions!"
Of course, all that investment will bring with it the ingredients that put Beaumont on the map more than a century ago and create a new boomtown.
Thus, "Rich with opportunity."
That's the new marketing campaign city of Beaumont, the Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Greater Beaumont Chamber of Commerce will pursue, thanks to research and brainstorming from consultant North Star Destination Strategies.
After a year of surveys, interviews and back-and-forth, North Star unveiled its campaign for the City Council last week.
North Star President Steve Chandler explained that Beaumont residents, while very proud of their city, have something of an inferiority complex because others perceive Beaumont as a dirty, industrial, unlovely kind of place.
"It is what it is," Chandler said. "And it's getting bigger."
And that makes the news about compliance with the Clean Air Act even more poignant and a point of celebration.
Yes, we might be getting more industry, and those process unit towers aren't for tourists, but Southeast Texans can breathe more easily - and deeply - without worrying.
Then there are those little leaves poking out from tree branches, and those lawns rapidly turning green from winter's brown.
All of that is pumping another kind of emission into the air.
It's called pollen, and that's what's got your throat a-scratchin'.
Can't help you there. It is what it is, and it's getting bigger.
