Corpus Christi District Court Judge Janis Jack awarded $6.7 million to the University to set up monitoring stations that will detect the presence of air pollutants in Corpus Christi's "Refinery Row."
The award was part of a $20 million criminal penalty issued in April 2001 against Koch Petroleum Group LLP for concealing its failure to conduct tests that would have revealed the presence of benzene in the wastewater of its Corpus Christi refinery, according to a Department of Justice Web site.
Benzene is a naturally occurring component in petroleum that is known to cause cancer in humans.
The $6.7 million awarded to the University will go to set up seven monitoring stations and two cameras to gather data over the next seven years, said David Allen, an engineering professor. The project will detect levels of hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide and hydrocarbons, such as benzene, in the air.
The College of Engineering is still acquiring permission to set up the monitoring stations in Refinery Row, near Nueces Bay, said Allen, who will head the project for the college's Center for Energy and Environmental Resources.
"We were selected for this project in Corpus Christi because of our broad experience in air qual-ity measurement and data samp-ling analysis," Allen said in a statement.
The center plans to involve a large staff of graduate students and research assistants and hopes to begin the project within the next six to nine months, Allen said.
The monitoring stations will join two other air-quality monitoring projects in Corpus Christi, said David Turner, air-section manager of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Corpus Christi office.
"Once the infrastructure is built, and the monitoring stations are operational, we will have one of the densest air-monitoring networks in the United States," Turner said.
It took two years for the judge to approve the UT project, Turner said, because other Corpus Christi environmental projects also applied for the money. The University received the largest share of the $10 million earmarked for environmental projects. The rest of the penalty was paid as a fine to the federal government.
The Koch Petroleum Group paid at least two settlements to the federal government for environmental damage in 2000, including $35 million for a series of Texas oil spills totaling 3 million gallons of oil, and $4.5 million for violations of the Clean Air Act, according to Environmental Pro-tection Agency Web sites.
Koch Petroleum Group changed its name to Flint Hills Resources in October 2001.
Be the first to comment on this article!