Flint Hills Odessa Plant, Texas

This is one of the largest petrochemical plants in Western Texas. It was built by the El Paso Gas Company, to use the hydrocarbons that the company handled along its extensive pipeline system, to make styrene and butadiene for a local General Tire rubber plant. The plant grew over the years, adding ethylene, propylene, and polyethylene production, and employing over 400 people. It has been owned by many different companies over its fifty-year history, most recently by Flint Hills Resources, which bought the plant from the Huntsman Chemical Company in 2007. In 2009, Flint Hills decided to close the plant, citing "market conditions," terminating around 395 employees and 150 contract workers in the process. It may or may not reopen.