Standard Oil

The Building of a Refinery

In 1889 a representative from Standard Oil, Theodore M. Towle, was sent to Whiting to purchase land for a new refinery. Because of Whiting's access to both Chicago, "the great city of Middle America" and Lake Michigan, which provided for water transportation, Whiting was an ideal site. Standard Oil left Whiting with 235 acres and construction started shortly thereafter. 1,500 laborers were brought in to tackle the immense job of leveling off the sand ridges and constructing the massive oil refinery. The first structure that Standard Oil erected was a water works. The company built a twenty-inch pipeline that connected the waters of Lake Michigan with the refinery. Shortly after, the construction of the giant storage tanks began. As more and more workers traveled to Whiting, it was becoming a frontier town. A public road, "Oklahoma" split the town in two dividing the pioneer homes from the saloons, dance halls, and boarding houses. The construction of the refinery was nearly completed by the summer of 1890. According to The Calumet Region, "Early in September, 1890, fires were started under the stills, and on Thanksgiving Day the first shipment of 125 tank cars of kerosene started to market. At this time the refinery had a charging capacity of about 10,000 barrels of crude oil per day."

First office workers for Standard Oil of Indiana Whiting.

Standard Oil Company's first building in Whiting 1890.

Dr. Robert E. Humphreys stands next to the Burton distillation unit, one of the great inventions of modern times. The still now resides in the Smithsonian Institute.

From The Calumet Region, "The rapid growth of the automobile industry and the general increase in the use of gasoline engines for other purposes ushered in a new era for Whiting. In 1909 Dr. William M. Burton, at the time general manager of manufacturing for Standard of Indiana, instructed Dr. Robert E. Humphreys, chief chemist in charge of the Whiting laboratory, to go to work on the problem of increasing the yield of gasoline from crude oil." Humphreys knew that the application of high temperatures would "crack" molecules and experimented with this process. After many failed attempts, he tried to use heat and pressure together on the oil. "When this was done, any oil as light as gas oil would distill off when a certain temperature was reached, and there would be no cracking. If the gas oil could be held in a still by the use of pressure until a cracking temperature was reached, Humphreys thought it might provide a good yield of gasoline." Humphrey's was right and the thermal cracking process was invented.

The 1955 Standard Oil Fire

On Saturday morning of August 27, 1955, at 6:15 a.m., without warning, several explosions tore apart Fluid Hydroformer Unit 700. According to an article that appeared in Industrial Fire World, "No single error or breakdown destroyed FHU-700. Rather, as in most industrial accidents, it was a specific sequence of events, one after another, that lead inexorably to the final outcome." Debris rained down from the sky damaging several homes in the process, and then the fires began. Flames consumed the refinery's storage tanks acre by acre for the next two days. When the fire was finally put out on September 4, 1955 fifty nine tanks have been completely destroyed, along with 1 1/4 million barrels of crude and refined products, not to mention the damage to civilian homes and refinery structures. Although this inferno shook Whiting and the smoke could be seen as far as Chicago the devastation only took the life of one individual. 3-year-old Richard Plewniak was killed in his sleep as a 10-foot steel pipe torpedoed through the roof of his home. 600 homes were evacuated to avoid any further casualties. Frank A. Horbleck, Standard Oil Refinery Chief, had plenty of resources at his disposal. Firemen from neighboring cities including Whiting, Hammond, East Chicago, and Chicago sent men and equipment to help quench the flames consuming the refinery. Also, 300 of the refinery's employees were trained as firefighters, and another 300 who had enough training to work as back up firefighters. The Standard Oil fire brigade was comprised of eleven fire marshals, seven fire trucks, 44 hose carts and 80,000 feet of fire hose 2 1/2 inches thick. As the days went by, the firefighters realized that there task was to contain rather than extinguish this fire bomb, and they began to create sand barricades around the refinery. When the fire was finally squelched eight days later, the inferno left a $30 million debt, declaring it a National Disaster, requiring the National Guard to assist with the chaos. A year later Standard Oil was back to business rebuilding where ever necessary and operating near 100 percent crude capacity.

Smoke billows out of one of the many storage tanks destroyed by the fire.

Mangled Steel and debris is all that is left of this structure

The Name May Change But The Product Stays The Same

In 1906, the U.S. Government ordered Standard Oil (New Jersey) to separate into multiple companies. They could have no business connections with one another or with Standard Oil (New Jersey.) Not until 1971 did the Whiting Refinery officially begin to use the brand name and Amoco corporate logo. Seventeen years later the Whiting Refinery underwent another name change. In 1998 British Petroleum Co. agreed to acquire Chicago-based Amoco Corp. for $53 billion in stock and debt, making it the biggest industrial merger ever. BP Amoco, through the merger, acquired 1,400 acres and processes 400,000 barrels of crude oil daily. The refinery now makes 16 million gallons of product a day, half of which is gasoline. The refinery also makes 8 percent of all asphalt used in the United States. There are 220 tanks in the refinery's tank fields. The largest tank can hold 600,000 barrels (21.4 million gallons) of crude oil. The refinery operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and employs about 1,200 people.