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the toxic truth
chapter 2
How the waste was created In late 2005 Trafigura decided to buy large amounts of unrefined petroleum called coker naphtha from PMI Trading Ltd, which is the commercial arm of Mexico’s stateowned petroleum company, PEMEX. Trafigura intended to use the coker naphtha as a cheap blendstock for fuels.36 A series of internal Trafigura emails, disclosed during a UK court action in 2009, revealed that the company expected to make a large profit from the deal: 16:54, 27 December 2005, email from an employee in the London office to several Trafigura executives:
““
[T]his is as cheap as anyone can imagine 37 and should make serious dollar.
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23:24. 27 December 2005, email from an employee in London to Trafigura’s chairman, Claude Dauphin:
““
FYI- following your lateral thought about cleaning the PMI origin high Mercaptan Sulphur material and paying a disposal company to take the waste away. We will make it happen. PMI showing us more barrels Super Cheap now. Just have to make them more compatible for 38 gasoline blending.
”
Mexico’s state-owned petroleum company PEMEX who provided the coker naphtha that Trafigura bought. © ANP/Carlos S. Pereyra
09:30, 28 December 2005, email from an employee in the London office to another Trafigura employee:
““
Claude owns a waste disposal company and wants us to be creative. Graham has worries that it will all turn black. Me and Leon want it cos each cargo should make 7m!! [7 million]. 39
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The coker naphtha offered for sale by PMI contained high levels of mercaptan sulphur;40 one of the reasons they were selling it so cheaply was because they did not have the capacity to refine it. In order to sell it, Trafigura needed to find a way of refining it. Company executives had identified two processes by which the coker naphtha could be refined: one called mercaptan oxidation (known as the “Merox process”), and another known as “caustic washing”. Both processes involve mixing caustic soda with the coker naphtha to capture the mercaptans (which creates a waste by-product). The Merox process includes a crucial second step whereby the waste is transformed into stable, and less harmful, disulphides through oxidation. This additional step is normally undertaken in a specialized facility. Trafigura considered establishing a facility to carry out a Merox-style process. One Trafigura executive noted that this option “would not be cheap, but it would work”.41