Koch brothers' petcoke firm threatens lawsuit over city rules

Escalating a fight with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a company that stores enormous mounds of petroleum coke on Chicago's Southeast Side is threatening to sue unless city officials allow the gritty piles to remain uncovered for another four years.

KCBX Terminals, a firm controlled by industrialists Charles and David Koch, is pushing to delay the construction of storage sheds for two years past a 2016 deadline imposed by the Emanuel's administration in response to complaints about black dust blowing into surrounding neighborhoods.

The company also wants to raise the maximum height of its piles to 45 feet rather than the 30-foot limit required under new city regulations, according to documents filed by KCBX that seek several exemptions, known as variances, from the Chicago Department of Public Health.

"If the department denies the variances, KCBX's only recourse would be to challenge the department in court," the company's lawyers wrote in an 88-page request that repeatedly describes the Emanuel rules as an "unreasonable hardship."

KCBX is in the midst of dramatically expanding its storage of petroleum coke, or petcoke, from the nearby BP refinery in Whiting and other refineries across the Midwest. State officials last year cleared the way for the company to handle up to 11 million tons a year of petcoke and coal at its sprawling open-air terminal off Burley Avenue between 108th and 111th streets.

Last year, another Koch subsidiary removed a waterfront mound of petcoke in Detroit under pressure from local political leaders, but KCBX appears to be girding for a long battle in Chicago. Even if the city balks at giving the company what it wants, dragging the dispute into court could keep the piles uncovered indefinitely.

The company's legal threat comes less than a month after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency accused KCBX of violating the federal Clean Air Act. Pollution monitors recorded high levels of lung-damaging particulate matter on April 12 and May 8 near the Burley Avenue terminal and a second KCBX site a few blocks north off 100th Street.

EPA investigators also used dust wipes to sample the black film coating about a dozen locations in the East Side neighborhood. The EPA said it found the chemical fingerprints of petcoke in five of the samples, with the highest levels found on the exteriors of homes closest to uncovered piles of the refinery byproduct.

In February, Emanuel vowed he would make it too costly for companies to store petcoke in Chicago. "Dumping an environmental product that damages our health is not something that we want to welcome," he told WBEZ radio.

KCBX and its allies responded that Emanuel's regulations sent the wrong message to the business community and could cost Chicago 40 jobs at the company's storage terminals.

The rest is here:
Koch brothers' petcoke firm threatens lawsuit over city rules