THE KOCH BROTHERS--PETROCHEMICALS It is often said that the KOCH BROTHERS are in the oil business. That’s true as far as it goes—but KOCH INDUSTRIES is not a major oil producer. Instead, the company has woven itself into every nook of the vast industrial web that transforms raw fossil fuels into usable goods. KOCH-owned businesses trade, transport, refine, and process fossil fuels, moving them across the world and up the value chain until they become things we forgot began with hydrocarbons: fertilizers, Lycra, the innards of our smartphones. The company controls at least four oil refineries, six ethanol plants, a natural-gas-fired power plant and 4,000 miles of pipeline. Until recently, KOCH refined roughly five percent of the oil burned in America (that percentage is down after it shuttered its 85,000-barrel-per-day refinery in North Pole, Alaska, owing, in part, to the discovery that a toxic solvent had leaked from the facility, fouling the town’s ground water). From the fossil fuels it refines, KOCH also produces BILLIONS OF POUNDS of PETROCHEMICALS, which, in turn, become the feedstock for other KOCH businesses. In a journey across KOCH INDUSTRIES, what enters as a barrel of WEST TEXAS CRUDE can exit as a Stainmaster carpet. KOCH’S hunger for growth is insatiable: Since 1960, the company brags, the value of KOCH INDUSTRIES has grown 4200-fold, outpacing the Standard and Poor’s index by nearly 30 times. On average, KOCH projects to double its revenue every six years. Koch is now a key player in the fracking boom that’s vaulting the United States past Saudi Arabia as the world’s top producer, even as it’s endangering America’s groundwater. In 2012, a KOCH subsidiary opened a pipeline capable of carrying 250,000 barrels a day of fracked crude from South Texas to Corpus Christi, where the company owns a refinery complex, and it has announced plans to further expand its Texas pipeline operations. In a recent acquisition, KOCH bought Frac-Chem, a top provider of hydraulic fracturing chemicals to drillers. Thanks to the BUSH administration’s anti-regulatory agenda—which KOCH INDUSTRIES helped craft—Frac-Chem’s chemical cocktails, injected deep under the nation’s aquifers, are almost entirely exempt from the SAFE DRINKING WATER ACT. --FROM the ROLLING STONE article, INSIDE THE KOCH BROTHERS TOXIC EMPIRE
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 01:17:32 +0000
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