Texas City Refinery, Texas

At four miles wide, this refinery in complex in Texas City, now officially called the Marathon Galveston Bay Refinery (formerly BP Texas City), southeast of Houston, is one of the largest industrial sites in the country. The perimeter is intensely developed, and contains a number of plants and companies, connected to each other symbiotically by shared chemical products circulated in pipelines. On the west end is Dow's Texas City Operations. In the middle and dominating the site is the former BP refinery, now owned by Marathon. With a capacity of 451,000 barrels per day, this is usually ranked as the third largest refinery in the USA. It is also notorious for deadly industrial accidents. In 2005, an explosion killed 15 workers, and injured more than 170 others.  In 2013, BP completed the sale of the refinery to Marathon Petroleum Corporation for an estimated $2.4 billion, as part of a wide-ranging sale of assets necessitated by the need for BP to raise cash for liabilities and fines in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Currently the refinery produces gasoline, distillates, aromatics, heavy-fuel oil, refinery-grade propylene, fuel-grade coke and sulfur, while the four chemical units in operation produce paraxylene and metaxylene. Sterling Chemical, and Valero have facilities on the east side of the Texas City site. The east edge of the complex is the Port of Texas City, which serves the complex.