Capacity crash
Phillips 66’s announcement of its progress on the refinery shuttering comes amid growing concerns by California’s in-state refiners that unfavorable market conditions alongside regulatory pressure stemming from aggressive state legislation aimed at refiners will prevent long-term viability and competitiveness of crude processing activities in the region.
While state officials recently voted to delay enactment of legislation blamed for decisions by California refiners to end operations at their conventional processing sites—which, in addition to Phillips 66 in Los Angeles, includes Valero Energy Corp.’s planned closure of its 145,000-b/d Benicia refinery, just northeast of San Francisco, by midyear 2026—refiners have yet to indicate any signs of backing down from advancing existing shutdown plans.
With the state’s loss of about 20% of its traditional crude processing capacity since 2020—and nearly another estimated 20% at threat with the closure of the Los Angeles and Benicia sites—California’s refining capacity may face an additional short-term blow to its consumer fuels market following a late-evening fire on Oct. 2 at Chevron 290,000-b/d refinery in El Segundo.
Chevron El Segundo refinery fire
“Chevron fire department personnel, including emergency responders from the City of El Segundo and Manhattan Beach [were] actively responding to an isolated fire inside the Chevron El Segundo [r]efinery [on Oct. 2]. All refinery personnel and contractors have been accounted for and there are no injuries,” Chevron said in a statement posted to its official website.
“No evacuation orders for area residents [were] put in place by emergency response agencies monitoring the incident, and no exceedances have been detected by the facilities fence line monitoring system,” the operator said.
In a separate early morning statement on Oct. 3, the city of El Segundo said the fire “originated at a process unit at the southeast corner of the refinery.” Details of the impacted unit, however, were not revealed.
According to city officials, both California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) and the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) also have responded to the incident.
Having already deployed its internal Health, Safety & Environment personnel to the site to conduct mobile air-quality monitoring in the surrounding communities, Chevron will also be launching its own investigation to determine the cause of the fire, the city said.
Chevron has neither disclosed details regarding the current status of operations at the refinery, nor provided preliminary guidance related to potential damages resulting from the incident.
