Podcast: 11 Fires, 60 Days: What's Really Behind the 2026 Refinery Crisis

Eleven refinery and fuel facility fires across four continents in roughly 60 days — that's the alarming backdrop for this episode of Process Safety with Trish and Traci. Process safety expert Trish Kerin examines whether the 2026 incidents are a statistical anomaly or a symptom of deeper systemic pressure. She points to deferred maintenance, narrowing margins and the normalization of risk during periods of production stress as key contributing factors. Kerin also addresses the unique vulnerabilities of new facilities and aging infrastructure. Her bottom line: know your controls, check that they're working and talk to your people.

Transcript (edited for clarity)

Traci: Welcome to Process Safety with Trish and Traci, the podcast that aims to share insights from past incidents to help avoid future events. Please subscribe to this free award-winning podcast on your favorite platform so you can continue learning with Trish and me. I'm Traci Purdum, editor-in-chief of Chemical Processing. And with me, as always, is the one and only Trish Kerin, director of Lead Like Kerin. Hey, Trish — you and I are currently in the same time zone.

Trish: We are, Traci. This happens very rarely, but it is happening today.

Traci: Yes, very rarely indeed. Today's episode is going to dig into some very current events — specifically the refinery and fuel facility fires of 2026, which have unfolded against the much larger backdrop of the U.S.-Iran conflict and disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. Analysts note that aging infrastructure, reduced maintenance and increasingly complex systems mean even small fires or unit failures can escalate into significant supply disruptions. Today's oil system has fewer backups and higher complexity than during past oil shocks. These incidents raise real process safety questions.

Mapping Out 11 Refinery Fires

I want to quickly run through all the incidents this year, so bear with me.

1. Feb. 19: an explosion at the Chevron El Segundo Refinery in California.
2. March 1: a major fire at Ecuador's largest oil refinery.
3. March 5: a fire at the Petromax Refining facility in Channelview, Texas [Editor's note: Traci mentions Marathon Texas City Refinery. This was incorrect.]
4. March 17: a fire at Pemex's Olmeca Refinery in Tabasco, Mexico — the company's newest refinery — in which five people were killed after oily water overflowed the refinery's perimeter during heavy rain and ignited on a neighboring road.
5. March 23: a major explosion and fire at the Valero Port Arthur Refinery in Texas, one of the largest refineries in the U.S., processing roughly 435,000 barrels per day.
6. April 9: a second incident at the Olmeca Refinery — a fire confined to a warehouse storing petroleum coke, a byproduct of processing heavy crude fractions.
7. April 15: flames as high as 60 meters erupted after a gas leak ignited at the Viva Energy Geelong Refinery in Victoria, Australia — a 120,000-barrel-per-day plant and one of only two operating oil refineries in the country.
8. April 18: an explosion at the BP Cherry Point Refinery in Washington state injured three workers and triggered an emergency response.
9. April 20: a major fire broke out near the crude distillation unit of the new $9.5 billion HPCL Refinery petrochemical project in India; preliminary investigations pointed to a hydrocarbon leak from a valve.
10. April 21: an explosion at a natural gas and oil well site in Nacogdoches County, Texas, set off a large fire visible for miles.
11. And April 27: a hydrogen and gas leak at the Shell Norco facility in Louisiana triggered an explosion and fire that took roughly 10 hours to extinguish.

That's 11 significant refinery incidents across four continents in roughly 60 days. What's your gut reaction as a process safety professional — statistical anomaly, or does it tell you something?

Trish: It's an astoundingly long list. I've been watching this unfold over the past couple of months, and we are clearly seeing a lot of refinery and downstream incidents. It could just be a statistical anomaly, but I'm more inclined to think we're seeing pressure on the supply chain — shortages of crude, price of oil, all of those factors combining. Facilities are perhaps being pushed beyond their limits. And what's fortunate so far is there hasn't been a significant human toll. Aside from one incident, I don't believe there have been fatalities across these 11 events. Am I right?

Traci: There were five fatalities in one incident, but yes — out of 11 events, that is remarkably few.

Trish: Right. Those five lives are still an unacceptable tragedy, but it could have been far worse given the sheer number of events. Something is going on, and we need to drill into it.

Geopolitical Stress

Traci: How does this macro environment of geopolitical stress factor into process safety risk at the facility level?

Trish: There are a couple of dynamics at play. Facilities have operating costs they need to manage, and one of those is the price of their input product — crude oil. When that price rises, margins can get squeezed. If you can't recover that cost increase through your output sale price — and sometimes you can't — you end up with what we call narrowing margins. The refinery is working harder for less income.

The fixed costs of running a refinery are substantial. Just because oil prices are high doesn't mean your payroll decreases — that's a fixed cost you can't trim. So attention turns to variable costs. One option is to delay or postpone maintenance to ease the cost burden and keep the facility economical to operate.

When I worked in a refinery, we knew the price of a barrel of oil every single day. In mining, you know the price of your commodity every day because it drives the economics of the business. When margins become very tight, decisions get made that can have longer-term process safety implications.

What has surprised me is how quickly we've seen multiple refinery issues emerge. I would have expected a lag — you push equipment harder, you cut back on maintenance, and you'd expect it to take several months to play out. The timing here is unusual.

Deferred Maintenance

Traci: Let's talk more about that deferred maintenance. The Geelong Refinery manager acknowledged that some maintenance had been postponed before that fire. What happens when you go down that path?

Trish: There are a couple of reasons a facility might postpone maintenance. One is cost — to reduce the financial burden on the organization. The other is to keep production running. You noted that Australia has only two oil refineries, which is not much refining capacity for a country of that geographic size. In that environment, you really don't want to shut down a unit for maintenance when every barrel of refining capacity is needed. So we see instances where shutdowns get delayed to keep fuel flowing to consumers.

There are ways to do this safely. The key is to conduct a proper risk assessment based on your maintenance history — what's called a risk-based maintenance or risk integrity strategy. You look at the history of that particular piece of plant and ask: Can we keep running for a period of time, or do we need to implement additional interim controls to manage the increased risk that comes from deferring that maintenance?

I'm not saying any of these refineries failed to do a risk assessment before deferring maintenance. I would be highly surprised if they hadn't gone through that process. The question is whether we got the right outcomes — and perhaps, given the number of incidents, we didn't.

Dangers of Normalizing Risk

Traci: Trevor Kletz wrote extensively about how organizations normalize risk during periods of production pressure. There's risk assessment during normal times, and then there's risk assessment through that pressure filter. What are your thoughts?

Trish: Risk assessments are done by humans, and we all carry biases that influence our decisions. One of the big challenges I've seen throughout my career — and I'm sure many listeners have experienced this, too — is walking into a risk assessment where everyone already knows what the answer is going to be before the assessment is done, because we know what the answer needs to be.

My concern is when that happens without putting additional controls in place. The risk gets assessed as acceptable because it needs to be, even when it isn't. If additional controls had been implemented, maybe the risk could have genuinely been managed. There are always many competing pressures — internal and external — that pull on decision-making. If we think we're not subject to those pressures, we're fooling ourselves. We all are. What matters is how we respond to them in the moments that count.

My call to people would be this: when you're going into a risk assessment to defer maintenance, ask yourself what additional controls you need to put in place in the interim to make that risk truly tolerable. Maintenance is scheduled for a reason. We don't do it for fun — it's expensive, it's difficult, and every time we intervene in the facility and start pulling things apart, we're actually in a higher-risk period ourselves. We do it because we have to. If we're deferring it, we need to genuinely understand the risk and put adequate interim controls in place.

Startup Risks

Traci: Following that production pressure angle — and shifting slightly — Mexico's Olmeca Refinery had two fires in two months, and it's a brand-new facility. What are the unique process safety vulnerabilities of a new refinery that people might not expect? Is there something about the pressure to get a new facility producing that creates a distinct category of risk?

Trish: Any startup activity carries a heightened level of risk. When a refinery is in continuous operation, it's probably in its safest state — everything is smooth and processing consistently. Startup and shutdown are the highest-risk operational activities you'll undertake, because the environment is constantly changing. You're cycling through pressure changes, temperature changes, pumps starting and stopping — a highly dynamic situation.

On top of that, a brand-new facility has never been run before. I have never seen a project that was absolutely perfect the first time, every time. There are always defects to find — that's why we have punch lists and pre-startup safety reviews, where you physically check everything before you bring the plant up. If you're rushing to start up, you may be shortcutting those checks. Have all the flanges been adequately torqued? Were any missed? Are gaskets in good condition? A brand-new gasket should be fine, but was it damaged when it was installed in a hurry? All of those are potential leak sites.

New facilities also typically require more maintenance than a steady-state operation. This is what's known as the bathtub effect — if you picture a U-shaped curve, maintenance requirements are high in the early life of a plant, drop down through most of its operating life, then rise again toward end of life as equipment degrades. A brand-new refinery needs a bedding-in phase. Think of buying a new car — the manual tells you not to over-rev the engine in the first thousand miles. You drive it reasonably before you push it hard. That same principle applies to a new refinery.

With the current geopolitical and supply chain pressures, we're seeing pressure to go faster and harder. That's a real concern.

Most Important Lesson: Asset Integrity

Traci: If you had to name the single most important process safety lesson that connects all of these 2026 incidents, what would it be?

Trish: Focus on asset integrity. That's what it's all about — keeping the tiger in its cage. The hazard is the hydrocarbon we're managing, and to control that hazard we need good asset integrity. Don't push your units too hard or too fast. Check them adequately. Run them appropriately.

Traci: Is there anything about today's refining landscape that makes it more vulnerable than it was 20 years ago? Aging infrastructure, labor issues, fewer backup systems?

Trish: Aging infrastructure is definitely a factor — the bathtub effect again. As assets get older, maintenance requirements and asset integrity issues increase. But there's more to it than that. We're also seeing a lot of older refineries pass to smaller operators as the major oil companies have sold off assets over the years. I'm not saying this is exclusively a small-operator issue — your list included some large players as well. But we need to ensure that whichever companies are running these facilities have the capability to run them safely. The ownership and operational landscape is shifting, and that may be playing out in what we're seeing.

Have The Conversation

Traci: What would you say directly to a plant manager or operations leader listening right now who's feeling that production pressure? What conversation do they need to be having with their leadership?

Trish: They need to focus on understanding what their controls and barriers are to prevent their major incident scenarios — and then assure themselves that those controls are actually working. How do you know your controls are working? Because the only thing standing between you and a major incident is your controls. As a plant manager, how do you know?

Traci: Is there anything you want to add?

Trish: Talk to your people. Your operators and maintainers are the ones who actually know what's happening out in the field. Have that conversation with them. Ask them which controls they think are degrading right now — they will have a wealth of information to share. They can help you navigate how to operate safely in the current economic climate. Talk to your people, and go check those controls. Make sure you know they're working.

Traci: Trish, you always bring a wealth of knowledge — and you help us keep the tiger in its cage and stay focused on asset integrity. Thank you. Unfortunate events happen around the world, and we'll be here to discuss and learn from them. Subscribe to this free podcast to stay on top of best practices, and visit ChemicalProcessing.com for more tools and resources to help you run efficient and safe facilities. On behalf of Trish, I'm Traci, and this is Process Safety with Trish and Traci.

Trish: Stay safe.

Additional Soundbite: The Crude Slate Challenge

Trish: One thing we didn't get to: you can't just take any crude oil and push it through any refinery. Refineries are finely tuned to their feedstock. It's not simply a matter of buying crude from anywhere and running it through. Refineries operate on a very specific crude mix, and if you change that mix, you're going to see lower throughput and product quality problems.

More significantly, in the longer term, you may get unintended corrosion that you wouldn't normally see with your usual crude slate. The chemistry changes, and new safety issues — like accelerated corrosion — can emerge. Most people don't realize that specific crude goes into specific refineries. The question becomes: how do you manage the risk of a changing crude slate when you don't know what's going to be available? That's a fascinating and underappreciated challenge.