THE VIEWING deck at Port Arthur’s City Hall offers visitors to the industrial city a view of the small downtown and the glimmering waterway. The channel is lined with massive tankers and refineries. John Beard, a former city councilman, can name each and every facility that’s visible on the horizon. Just like a city booster in another town might point out skyscrapers and their architectural features, Beard can tell you what each facility produces and what pollutants are carried in the plumes of gray-brown smoke from their flares.
Beard has lived in Port Arthur for most of his life and spent decades working at the local Exxon plant. Now retired, he’s found himself on the other side, fighting off the industrial expansion that fueled Port Arthur’s growth for more than a century.
Port Arthur bills itself as the Energy City. The tagline is plastered all over city hall. The oldest refineries in Port Arthur date back to 1901: The same year that Spindletop, the state’s first major oil gusher, erupted in nearby Beaumont, Gulf Oil built the town’s first refinery. By 1914, Port Arthur was one of the nation’s largest oil refining ports.
“My parents came here in the late ’20s and early ’30s,” Beard says. “We were right next to the old Texaco plant. I have family pictures of me as a young boy, and our house was so close that you could lean out the window and touch [Texaco’s] fence.” His father worked at one of the city’s refineries, and the steady salary allowed him to buy a home. “That was Port Arthur’s economy: You worked for Gulf or Texaco or the City of Port Arthur or the school district.”
The industrial landscape Beard knows so well has blanketed Port Arthur in harmful air pollution, leaving the city with rates of cancer higher than the state average, particularly among Black residents, who are more likely than white residents to live closer to the industrial facilities.
And as oil and gas companies have automated their operations, the jobs are increasingly scarce. For years, both as an industry employee and a city official, Beard has heard companies like Exxon and Motiva promise jobs and prosperity for residents of the predominantly Black community and then hire people from out of town or out of state for the highest-salaried jobs. Beard knows community members who have degrees in chemical engineering and haven’t been able to get a job at one of the plants.
In the next few years, the city is poised to become one of the nation’s largest liquified natural gas (LNG) export hubs, piping in natural gas from the Permian Basin in West Texas, chilling it to subzero temperatures, and loading the gas, now in liquid state, onto tankers headed for Europe and Asia, where it will be burned in power
