walking around the refinery. She thought the equipment inside the control room was primitive: most of the screens displayed only a digital readout of numbers—much of the data wasn’t even displayed but instead was printed out on a scroll of paper.
The control room wasn’t the only place that could use improvement. There were other problems at the refinery—much more dangerous problems—that had been left to fester for years. One of these problems was the refinery’s sewer system, which had been decaying without repair. One of the operators who worked at the wastewater plant, named Todd Aalto, had seen firsthand how the infrastructure was falling apart. When inspecting the sewer system, Aalto noticed that the concrete floor of one section had eroded away completely, leaving nothing but wire mesh along the bottom. Shift workers routinely disposed of various chemicals into the “oily water” sewer, dumping large drums of things like naphtha and xylene down into the pipes. It was impossible to measure how much might be leaking out into the outside environment through the cracks and fissures below.
Giant investments were being made at Pine Bend during the 1990s, and Faragher wanted some of that money to go into the utilities infrastructure, like the sewers and water treatment plants. But the engineers couldn’t make such decisions; only the process owners. In this case, the decision would have gone up to Karen Hall’s boss, a man named Steven David, whom everybody called Steve. He was the boss of all the environmental engineers, but this still didn’t give him the same status as a real process owner. The engineers were a nonprofit center, after all. David was forty-two years old and more experienced than Brian Roos. But David was still at a lower rank than Roos in the refinery pecking order.
Faragher proposed new investments and upgrades that could be made at the wastewater plant, but those investments were delayed or rejected time and time again. All investments at the refinery were evaluated with one goal in mind: return on investment. The process owners would put their money where it generated the most profit within the plant. Investing in pollution control technology or sewer pipes just couldn’t compete with investing in a new cracking unit that could increase oil production. New equipment was just too profitable. A big investment in new refining equipment might be able to pay for itself within one year. An investment in sewer pipes, on the other hand, might not be earned back for several years.
Still, Faragher pleaded for new investments to Steve David and Karen Hall. She believed that such investments would benefit the company for many years to come. At first, Faragher thought that this argument might win the day. One of the great things about Koch Industries was how quickly projects were approved; there wasn’t a lot of bureaucratic decision-making. But Faragher learned that only certain kinds of projects got approval from on high.
“If the payback of the investment was going to be less than a year, they’d basically give you permission and you could run with it,” she recalled. “If I needed money for wastewater treatment, it was like pulling teeth. It was like, ‘Why do you need that? That’s not going to make me any money.’ ”
* * *
At the Pine Bend refinery, Koch was allowed to expel an average of 8.3 kilograms of chromium every day and 714 kilograms of ammonia. That was the letter of the law. But Faragher also wanted to abide by the intent of clean-water laws. Obviously, the intent of the law was to keep large levels of ammonia out of the nation’s waterways. That’s why the limit of 714 kilograms was set. But setting the limit at 714 kilograms did not mean that regulators wanted Koch to pump 714 kilograms per day into the Mississippi River. The state had set a maximum level of pollution, but the goal was to be under that level. The intent of the law was to encourage Koch to pollute as little as possible.
With that in mind, Faragher designed a water treatment plan that kept ammonia and other toxins at very low levels. When it came to measuring pollution, everyone in her business used the terminology of “parts per million” to figure out how much pollution was leaving the pipes with each gallon of water and how close the company was to hitting its limits.
If the mandatory limit was forty parts per million, Faragher liked to keep the flow at about twenty parts per million. This