Wood River Refinery’s First 100 Years

Early Years

International oil company Royal Dutch-Shell first invested in oil-producing Oklahoma properties in 1912, forming Roxana Petroleum. The subsidiary acquired oil rights and produced crude throughout the state.

In 1916, Royal Dutch-Shell decided to develop Roxana Petroleum into a fully integrated oil company. The expanded operations – including producing, refining, selling, and transporting petroleum products in the central United States – would be based in the St. Louis region. Wood River's proximity to main railroad lines and the Mississippi River water source made it an ideal location. The company paid just under $35,000 for a 172-acre tract of farmland a few miles south of town.

Construction on the refinery began in the summer of 1917. Just a few months earlier, the United States had entered what would come to be known as World War I. The war created supply shortages and shipping delays. The refinery finally started operations in September 1918 with 175 workers.

In the beginning, the refinery processed crude oil using Trumble units for distillation. The method heated crude oil to a high temperature and then progressively cooled it. As it cooled, different constituent vapors were condensed out and collected at each successive temperature, creating fuel oil, kerosene, and gasoline.

Crude processing capacity reached 16,000 barrels of crude per day after installation of a third Trumble unit.

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Roaring Twenties

Automobile sales in America took off in the post-war years. From 1916 to 1920, the number of cars on the road tripled to 9 million. The price of oil increased 150% to $3.50 per barrel crude.

Increased demand for gasoline led to innovations in "cracking." Cracking used pressurization to break apart fuel oil and kerosene molecules, increasing gasoline yield. C.P. Dubbs patented his "clean circulation" cracking process in 1921. The Roxana Petroleum refinery was an early adopter and began constructing a Dubbs unit in March of 1920. By late 1922, the refinery had worked out the kinks. Construction of six more Dubbs units soon followed.

Over the course of the decade, mass production made automobiles more affordable. More and more Americans purchased them: over 23 million passenger cars traveled the nation's new paved roads in 1929. Roxana Petroleum changed its name to Shell Petroleum to identify itself more closely in consumers' minds with the Shell brand on its products.

The refinery's crude processing capacity reached 35,000 barrels per day.

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Depression Years

Everything changed in 1930. Consumer purchases of durable goods – including cars – dropped drastically. After over a decade of increasing demand for gasoline, Shell Petroleum faced a shrinking market and plummeting prices. Fifty percent of the company's employees lost their jobs. The Wood River Refinery shut down half its Dubbs units within two years.

Shell began exploring different household markets. Low fuel oil prices increased demand for oil-burning home heaters. The same was true for kerosene-fueled kitchen ranges and hot-water heaters. The nascent commercial aviation industry was another growing market.

The company also worked to market its gasoline products more effectively.

In 1927, customers had paid 3¢ more per gallon for premium "Super-Shell" gas. It was later replaced with "Super-Shell Ethyl." As technology improved, the newer equipment at the Wood River Refinery routinely produced gasoline as good as the old Super-Shell gas.

So in 1933, Shell Petroleum replaced its regular gasoline with the new version of Super-Shell, marketing it as "premium gasoline at the price of regular." Sales skyrocketed.

But the Great Depression still hit Shell Petroleum hard. The company didn't show a profit for the first half of the decade. In 1936, the company took a hard look at projected demand, anticipated supplies, and facility requirements. A gasoline pipeline from Wood River to Ohio would vastly and permanently reduce delivery transportation costs. The 450-mile pipeline went into operation in 1938. The same year, the company shut down its refineries in Arkansas City and East Chicago, concentrating Mid-Continent production in Wood River.

An expansion and modernization of the Wood River Refinery completed in 1940 increased the facility's daily capacity to 75,000 barrels.

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World War II

The First World War had impeded construction and production at the Wood River Refinery, but World War II facilitated progress. About 95% of wartime production at the refinery involved products for the military.

The Wood River Refinery manufactured large amounts of toluene for Allied bombs. It also developed and pioneered production of a special anti-rust lubricating turbine oil for the U.S. Navy.

The refinery had implemented new polymerization and alkylation processes and catalytic cracking in the 1938-1940 expansion. These innovations equipped the refinery to meet the wartime demand for high-octane gasoline.

The 100-octane gas that Wood River produced for the U.S. Army Air Corps earned the employees special recognition. The Army-Navy "E" Award for manufacturing excellence went, for the first time, to one of the nation's oil refineries.

"You of the Wood River Refinery are coming through just as much as our soldiers, sailors, and marines. Every time you beat a production schedule, every time you devise a more efficient method of refining, every time you give your individual job that 'extra something,' you are bringing the day of peace that much nearer."
—Navy Commander W.F. Veatch. Source: John Schroeder, The Wonder at Wood River (Shell Oil Company, 1993).

By the end of World War II, the refinery's capacity had increased to 95,000 barrels daily.

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Post-War Setbacks and Growth

Immediately after the war ended, Americans lined up for gas at any service stations that had survived wartime rationing. Farmers and other companies began using the rust-inhibiting turbine oils originally manufactured for the Navy. Business continued to be good for the Wood River Refinery.

But a flood interrupted the local post-war boom on June 30, 1947. The waters of the Mississippi River breached a levee about ten miles south of the refinery. A few days later, the pipelines supplying crude oil to the refinery burst. It took pipeline crews four days to repair a line and restore operations.

In the spring following the flood, a twister touched down in communities near the refinery where many employees lived. The next year another tornado devastated parts of Wood River and Roxana. Finally, in December 1949 and January 1950 two tornadoes found the Shell refinery itself. The damage shut down the lube processing and deasphalting plants.

A grave tragedy of a different sort struck the refinery on September 17, 1951. As night crew workers prepped the Dubbs 17 cracking unit for routine cleaning, oil trapped in the bottom of the unit ignited. The explosion killed four men instantly.

It took more than 100 firefighters to subdue the resulting fire. Blazes reached to fifty feet high and men ran screaming from the scene, their clothing in flames. Initial casualties included thirteen deaths and twenty injured. The death toll ultimately rose to eighteen.¹

Nonetheless, production at the refinery continued to increase: oil displaced coal as the primary source of energy in America in 1950. The Wood River Refinery opened the decade processing 140,000 barrels of crude a day and employing 4,000 people.

Footnotes

1The brief description here of this tragedy summarizes information from various newspaper articles, September 18-October 25, 1951, in Oil Companies [scrapbook], comp. Harold Meisenhemer. The scrapbook is available at the Madison County Archival Library for readers who would like more information about the tragedy and contemporary newspaper coverage of it as it unfolded.

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The Sixties

The longest strike

The longest strike at the Wood River Refinery began August 18, 1962. The strike involved 2,100 operating and maintenance workers from thirteen different unions. Pay raises were a key issue among many other intractable obstacles to resolution. After the strike had completely shut down production for two months, non-striking supervisory personnel filled in and got the plant back to partial operation.

Acrimony and even violence marked the long strike. An altercation between picketing strikers and company employees ended with a derailed boxcar and a visit to the emergency room. Late one night, someone fired a shotgun into the refinery manager's house. People in a passing car shot at a striking laborer. A department manager's wife sustained minor injuries when a brick shattered her glass door. Investigations into a power interruption at the refinery found a fuse and evidence of dynamite in an electrical manhole. Someone blew up a 20-inch reinforced concrete water supply main serving the refinery.¹

The strikers (minus 300 people laid off) finally returned to their jobs in February of 1963. The strike had lasted for over five months.

Progress

A Shell Oil Company booklet begins with a statement equating oil consumption with progress:

"A nation's progress toward better living can be measured by the amount of energy it consumes. Energy is the capacity to do work. The more a nation can increase this capacity, the more goods it can produce and distribute and the better its people can live. In the United States, more than two-thirds of all the energy required comes from petroleum."
Source: Wood River Refinery (Shell Oil Company, circa 1965).

The 1,700-acre refinery employed approximately 2,400 workers in the 1960s. An additional 1,000-strong support staff included about 200 scientists in the research laboratory. The United States Patent and Trademark Office issued dozens of patents to Wood River employees in the 1960s, the research facility's heyday. Shell shuttered the Wood River research laboratory in 1975 and transferred the researchers and staff to Houston.

The bragging rights to the title "Shell's biggest refinery" passed between the facilities in Wood River, Norco (Louisiana), and Deer Park (Houston, Texas) over the years. Wood River reclaimed it in 1969 in the midst of another major expansion. The improvements increased crude processing capacity to a whopping 245,000 barrels daily.

Footnotes

1The brief description here of the strike summarizes information from various newspaper articles, August 21-November 29, 1962, in Oil Companies [scrapbook], comp. Harold Meisenhemer. The scrapbook is available at the Madison County Archival Library for readers who would like more information about the strike and contemporary newspaper coverage of it as it unfolded.

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More Changes and Challenges

Changes

The refinery had to deal with crude oil supply interruptions during the 1970s. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised prices. Individual oil-producing countries instituted embargoes. Beginning in 1976, the refinery began diversifying to produce chemical products in addition to petroleum products. The facility's acetone plant went into service in 1980. The Wood River Refinery's official name was changed to the Wood River Manufacturing Complex, symbolically affirming the facility's new direction.

Women had worked for the refinery in administrative support positions for years, and had filled maintenance job labor shortages during World War II. But the Wood River Refinery first began routinely hiring women for non-administrative roles in the 1970s. In 1977, the Wood River Refinery posted a personal best crude oil processing average of 283,000 barrels a day. It broke the record the next year with 287,000 barrels daily. But by 1981, crude oil processing had decreased to 200,000 barrels a day.

Another tragic explosion

In the winter of 1984-1985, moisture in an exterior propane gas line near the "D and D" dewaxing and deasphalting building froze and cracked the 4-inch pipe. On January 23, 1985, the sun came out and melted the ice. Gas escaped through the now open crack.

The cloud of gas found its way into the "D and D" building before a heater pilot light ignited it. The explosion and fire nearly obliterated the "D and D" building, killing one worker and injuring seven others. Flames leapt to 150 feet high. Refinery firefighters controlled the blaze within an hour, but it continued to burn for five days. The explosion could be heard eight miles away and broke windows in the South Roxana community.

Spills, leaks, and emissions

The refinery had been addressing pollution generation since the late 1950s. One innovation, storing unused butane underground for use in winter gasoline formulations, eliminated the need to burn off gases in the summertime. In 1970, a new vent gas compressor operation addressed sulfur dioxide emissions produced during distillation. Redesigned storage tanks reduced hydrocarbon vapor emissions.

But in December of 1987, a distilling unit released 4,900 pounds of benzene into the atmosphere. This began a string of spills, leaks, and emissions at the refinery. In mid-August of 1989, catalytic cracking unit CCU-1 emitted 128,000 pounds of powdery catalyst. On November 28th, a sulfur pit fire resulted in an unknown amount of sulfur dioxide air pollution.

Two weeks later a fire in the sulfur recovery unit released 300 pounds of sulfur dioxide. In the meantime, the saturates gas plant emitted a total of 6,500 pounds of hydrocarbons. Later the same month, a ruptured frozen refinery pipe spilled 294,000 gallons of unleaded gasoline into the ground.

Then on Monday, February 19, 1990, a refinery worker discovered crude oil shooting out of the ground among the storage tanks. The oil had leaked from a 20-inch pipe buried three feet underground. By the end of the week, Shell had assessed the extent of the spill: 672,000 gallons. It took over two weeks to clean up the spill itself and several more to remediate the contaminated soil.

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Post-Shell at the Wood River Refinery

After being run by Shell for over eighty years, the Wood River Refinery became the property of a Shell-Texaco joint venture called Equilon in 1998. In 1999, the refinery employed 1,050 people, including 640 union employees.

Tosco Corp. purchased the refinery from Equilon in 2000. The new owner shifted emphasis from diversification back to making petroleum products. It also reduced the workforce from 920 workers down to 700.

In 2001, Phillips Petroleum Co. purchased Tosco Corp. A few months later, Phillips announced its imminent merger with Conoco to form ConocoPhillips. The Wood River facility processed 280,000 barrels of crude oil daily in 2002. A year later, the refinery's processing increased to 285,000 barrels.

The Wood River Refinery got authorization from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency in 2008 for a major upgrade. The three-year, $3.8 billion CORE (Coker and Refinery Expansion) project equipping the refinery to process Canadian Alberta oil sands crude began in 2009.

In 2017, the 2,200-acre facility operated by Phillips 66 employs 885 people. The refinery's three crude units process 314,000 barrels of crude daily. About half of the crude becomes gasoline and a quarter becomes diesel fuel. An eighth of the crude transforms into jet fuel, delivered directly to Lambert International Airport in St. Louis via pipeline and fulfilling 99% of the airport's needs. The facility also generates asphalt for road surfacing.¹

Footnotes

1Refinery information and statistics for 2017 from speakers and refinery tour at Wood River Refinery Annual Community Leaders' Dinner, 2017.

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Exhibit Extra: The Village of Roxana

The history of the village of Roxana is intertwined with that of the Wood River Refinery.

Before the village existed, Roxana Petroleum built six homes at the plant for supervisors and several dozen cottages nearby for refinery employees. But most workers lived in Alton. Laborers rode the streetcar to the end of the line in Hartford and then walked another mile to the refinery. When construction contractor Raymond O. Hancock & Co. built new housing near the refinery, the "Hancock Houses" enticed more laborers to live in the otherwise unpopulated area.

In early 1921, community residents petitioned the county and state to incorporate as the village of Roxana. The 1930 United States Census counted 1,140 residents in Roxana; two-thirds of those employed worked at the oil refinery. The refinery hired engineers, foremen, pipefitters, firefighters, machinists, electricians, welders, and painters. The census also recorded chauffeurs, clerks, janitors, and even a gardener and a registered nurse who all worked at the refinery.

The monthly rent for Roxana families averaged $24.69 in 1930. On Roxana Terrace, white-collar refinery workers paid about $34.75 in rent each month. Refinery manager E. Herman Schippers' rent was $60 per month. He also employed two live-in maids.

Over the next decade, the village's population grew by 20%. In 1941, Roxana's children attended local schools and could catch a movie at the Roxana Theatre. The village also had its own fire department. The refinery contributed more than 90% of the tax revenue funding these amenities.

The village continued to grow. In 1957, Roxana treasurer W.R. Armes boasted of its amenities:

"[T]here are now three large grocery stores, two garages, dry goods store, lumber yard, hardware store, two coal and ice dealers, service station, two cabinet and wood-working plants, real estate and insurance offices, two electrical and appliance dealers, dry cleaners, bicycle shop, a general fix-it shop, several beauty shops and numerous small enterprises. There is also a large theater and two photo shops."
Source: "Village of Roxana began and grew with Shell refinery," The Journal 38, no. 3 (Sept. 19, 1957).

According to census records, 2,090 people lived in Roxana in 1960. Living near the refinery meant tolerating frequent noxious odors and occasional dangerous explosions. Lightning strikes posed the greatest fire and explosion threat to the Wood River Refinery's "tank farm" of petrochemical storage tanks. Explosions shook the homes of refinery neighbors.

But by 1980, automation had rendered many refinery jobs obsolete. Employment at the refinery dwindled to a total workforce of 1,800 by 1985. Roxana's population declined and aged. During the first decade of the 2000s, Roxana's population remained steady at about 1,545 residents; one in four were 55 or older.

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Selected Bibliography

Note: Refinery oil processing and employment statistics presented textually throughout the exhibit and graphically on exhibit page Post-Shell at the Wood River Refinery were collected from Meisenheimer, Schroeder, Shell Review, Wood River Refinery, and Wood River Refinery Annual Community Leaders' Dinner. Additional employment statistics were collected from Beaton and Read.

Several years of census data and various individual newspapers were consulted for this exhibition in addition to the sources listed below.

• Beaton, Kendall. Enterprise in Oil. New York : Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957. Available at the Madison County Archival Library.
• The Journal 38, no. 3 (Sept. 19, 1957) [souvenir edition commemorating Wood River's Golden Anniversary]. Available at the Madison County Archival Library.
• Meisenheimer, Harold, comp. Oil Companies [scrapbook of newspaper articles]. Available at the Madison County Archival Library.
• Read, Roxann. Wood River Along the River Bend. Charleston: Arcadia, 2003. Available at the Madison County Archival Library.
• Schroeder, John. The Wonder at Wood River. Shell Oil Company, 1993. Available at the Madison County Archival Library.
• Shell Review 31, no. 19 (September 20, 1968). Available at the Madison County Archival Library.
• Wood River Refinery. Shell Oil Company, circa 1965. Available at the Madison County Archival Library. EMP OIL
• Wood River Refinery Annual Community Leaders' Dinner, 2017. Speakers: Chet Thompson (President and Chief Executive officer, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers), Melissa Erker, Jerry Knoyle (Refinery Manager). Tour guide: Tim Peterson (Refinery Technical Director).

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