As 120 rail cars loaded with 80,000 barrels of sweet crude from North Dakota pulled with a clang into the South Philadelphia high-speed oil-train unloading yard, thunderous applause erupted from many of the 1,000 workers at the former Sunoco Inc. refinery.
"Last year, we all thought we were going to get laid off and shut down," recalled Bob Partridge, who runs the warehouse for Philadelphia Energy Solutions L.L.C., operator of the former refinery. "Here we are and we are all working. It's a good day. Everyone I talk to is happy."
Just over a year ago, the Carlyle Group bought the refinery, and in that year, "we've accomplished a great deal," Philadelphia Energy Solutions CEO Philip Rinaldi told the crowd. The celebration Wednesday was a combination ribbon-cutting and inauguration for the rail facility and a one-year birthday party, with lunch for employees and guests under a tent.
Rinaldi named some of the accomplishments: more than $250 million in capital invested and 100 new permanent jobs. "We were able to swell the ranks of the United Steel Workers representation by more than 10 percent, and we think that's not bad in the first year."
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Gov. Corbett, Mayor Nutter, and other elected officials - including U.S. Rep. Robert Brady, who spoke before catching a train to Washington to deal with the federal government shutdown - were on hand.
"If we could get on one of those trains with passenger cars, not tanker cars, and head down to Washington, maybe we could address some of the issues in Washington the way we addressed them here in a bipartisan way," Corbett told the gathering.
"When I say bipartisan, I'm not just talking Republican-Democrat," Corbett said. "I'm talking the community, the companies, labor, and management, all working together to make sure the people are staying at work and growing jobs."
Brady was more pointed: "I wish I could bottle every one of you up and take you down I-95 with me to get some of them idiots down there to make them understand," he said, "and to get this country going forward. It's a total disgrace, and I'm totally frustrated."
Nutter commended the workforce, the companies, and Carlyle for getting through a tough time and "the prospect of the closure.
"You are doing something great here. This is an incredible complex," he said. "You see it all the time from the highway, having no real idea of what takes place here."
The refinery brings in 190,000 barrels a day of Bakken crude, including 30,000 via a combination of train and barge - a little more than half the refinery's needs.
The combined capacity of the Point Breeze and Girard Point refineries is "in excess of 330,000 barrels a day, making our Philadelphia refining complex the largest on the Eastern Seaboard," Rinaldi said.
The North Dakota shale oil displaces more expensive crude from the North Sea and Africa, whose high cost was one of the main reasons the refineries struggled to compete.
Rodney Cohen, Carlyle managing director, remembered "conceptualizing the deal and the year and a half, two years, we spent talking to Sunoco and trying to come up with a solution."
Cohen gave credit to Brian MacDonald, then president and CEO of Sunoco Inc., who stayed up "all night, every night, to make sure that all of you had jobs. I don't want it to get lost in history how this happened," he said.
"It was all of us, but Sunoco really stepped up at the end, too, and said this would be a criminal act, to let this thing close down and have all these people lose their jobs."
Cohen said that he spoke at a conference recently and that someone came up afterward and said that his father had worked at the refinery and his brothers work there now, "and you really did something to affect people's lives."
"In the world of private equity, that's a pretty wonderful thing to see, feel, and know," Cohen said, "and be able to stand here and say we really accomplished something terrific.
"We're going to do everything we can to keep it working and, hopefully, have many more joyous occasions to be here, with lots of other improvements and new ideas."
With that, the ribbon was cut and lunch was served.
BY THE NUMBERS
160,000 barrels of crude oil a day
2 trains per day with 120 cars each
1.5 miles in length for each train
$15B in annual revenue
1,000 employees
Source: Philly.com
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