ExxonMobil and Baytown: a hundred years side by side

Baytown is not a town that happens to have a refinery in it. The refinery came first, and the town took its name from it, twice, in two different centuries. That is not a metaphor. It is just what happened.

Where it started

In 1917, a group of Texas oilmen chartered Humble Oil & Refining, with Ross S. Sterling — later the governor of Texas — as a founder and its first president. Two years earlier, wildcatters at nearby Goose Creek had brought in gushers that made national news, and Humble went looking for a place on the water to refine what the field produced. Its partners bought roughly 2,200 acres on the bay, broke ground in the fall of 1919, and on May 11, 1920, the first crude went into a still. They named the new refinery Baytown, and the workers' settlement growing up around its gate took the same name.

To pay for the build, Humble sold half its stock to Standard Oil of New Jersey. In 1923, with the refinery running and a strike behind it, Humble laid out streets around the plant, ran water and power to them, and sold lots to its own employees on company financing — a section for supervisors and skilled tradesmen, a community hall for dances and meetings. It was a plant that had built itself a neighborhood, one paycheck and one lot at a time.

Three towns, one name

Here is the part most people outside Baytown don't know: the Baytown around the refinery gate and the city of Baytown are not quite the same thing, historically. The unincorporated settlement at the plant kept the refinery's name from 1920 on. Next door, the boomtown of Pelly — named for its first mayor — had grown to roughly 7,500 people at its 1920 peak, and the rival community of Goose Creek sat between them. For years the three ran as separate towns with one economy. Pelly annexed the unincorporated Baytown land in December 1945; two years later, Pelly and Goose Creek voters approved consolidation by wide margins; and on January 24, 1948, the merged city took the refinery's name for its own. The plant had already been Baytown for twenty-eight years by the time the city officially caught up.

The war years

When the country went to war in the early 1940s, the refinery went with it, becoming one of the nation's major sources of high-octane aviation gasoline for American and Allied planes. The government built the Baytown Ordnance Works on the same ground to make toluene, the base component of TNT; by the historical account, Baytown supplied nearly half of all the toluene used in the country's wartime explosives. A separate government-owned unit made butadiene and butyl for synthetic rubber, at a moment when the loss of the country's natural-rubber supply in the Pacific made a substitute urgent. Humble bought the ordnance works outright after the war and kept those lines running, which is a large part of why Baytown grew into a chemical town as well as a refining one — a refinery, a rubber plant, and eventually an olefins plant, on one stretch of ground, tracing back to a war most of the people working there now weren't alive for.

Building through the decades

The Baytown Olefins Plant came later, starting up in 1979 to crack the plant's feedstocks into ethylene, the building block for plastics. A second ethylene unit followed in 1997, and a third came online in 2018, part of a company-wide petrochemical buildout. Five years after that, in September 2023, ExxonMobil finished a $2 billion expansion at the complex — a new polymer-modifier line and a linear-alpha-olefins unit — that had put more than 3,500 people to work during construction and added about 200 permanent jobs once it was running. In December 2022, the site started up an advanced-recycling unit capable of processing more than 80 million pounds of plastic waste a year, which the company calls one of the largest facilities of its kind in North America. Somewhere in a filing cabinet is also a quieter number: the refinery's operations team went more than eighteen years and 11.2 million work hours without an OSHA-recordable injury, the kind of streak nobody throws a parade for but everybody inside the fence understands.

The scale of it now

The complex covers about 3,400 acres along the Houston Ship Channel and today ranks among the five largest refineries in the country by production. It employs roughly two thousand people directly, and about as many again work there for contractors, meaning that on an ordinary morning, something close to half of everyone inside the fence is wearing a badge from a different company. Its local taxes and payroll run into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year, money that eventually shows up in the county's tax rolls, its schools, and its roads.

The plant had already been Baytown for twenty-eight years by the time the city officially caught up.

What it means on a Tuesday

Most of what the plant means to the town doesn't show up in an annual report. It shows up at five in the morning, in a line of headlights coming off the highway toward the gate before it's light, and again at shift change, when traffic on the frontage roads thickens for twenty minutes and everyone recognizes it for what it is.

It shows up in the classroom, too. ExxonMobil has funded Lee College for more than ninety years, including a recent gift split between its Advanced Technology Department, a student support center that runs a food pantry and emergency aid, and career services, plus a separate grant to Goose Creek CISD, the district serving most of Baytown's kids, for STEM programs. Every year, more than a thousand ExxonMobil employees volunteer with local schools, nature centers, food banks, and other organizations, and the company leads the annual United Way of Greater Baytown Area and Chambers County campaign.

Talk to enough people here and you will meet families with three generations under one badge: a grandfather from the ordnance works or the postwar rubber lines, a parent who ran a unit through the decades Humble became Exxon and then ExxonMobil, and a son or daughter now coming up through Lee College's Process Technology program hoping to follow them in. That is closer to the norm here than the exception.

A hundred years, still running

A refinery doesn't have an anniversary the way a person does. It is shut down in sections, inspected, rebuilt, and restarted in an endless rotation called a turnaround, so no two of its hundred-plus years have looked quite the same, even as the fence line has barely moved. What has stayed constant is the arrangement underneath it: a company that has kept building here, from the ordnance works to the olefins plant to the recycling unit, and a town that took the plant's name for its own, twice, and has kept sending its sons and daughters to Lee College and its contractor lots ever since.

Questions people ask

How many people does ExxonMobil employ in Baytown? Roughly two thousand direct employees, plus about as many contract workers on an average day.

When did the Baytown refinery open? Construction started in fall 1919; the first crude went into a still on May 11, 1920.

Did the city of Baytown take its name from the refinery? Yes, in two stages. The refinery and its settlement were named Baytown in 1920. The separate cities of Pelly and Goose Creek consolidated in 1947–48 and took the Baytown name for the new combined city on January 24, 1948.

What did the plant make during World War II? High-octane aviation gasoline, close to half the country's wartime toluene, and synthetic-rubber components at a government-owned works on site.

Does ExxonMobil still support Lee College and local schools? Yes — more than ninety years of funding to Lee College, plus grants to Goose Creek CISD for STEM programs and more than a thousand employee volunteers a year.

Is ExxonMobil still building in Baytown? Yes. A $2 billion chemical expansion finished in 2023, and an advanced-recycling unit processing more than 80 million pounds of plastic waste a year started up in December 2022. See ExxonMobil Baytown, as an employer and the full guide to working in Baytown.

En español

ExxonMobil y Baytown llevan más de cien años uno al lado del otro, y la ciudad le debe su nombre a la refinería dos veces. Humble Oil & Refining se fundó en 1917, compró unas 2,200 acres junto a la bahía, y el 11 de mayo de 1920 empezó a refinar petróleo en el sitio que llamó Baytown. En 1923, Humble construyó calles y casas para sus propios empleados alrededor de la planta. Las ciudades vecinas de Pelly y Goose Creek se consolidaron en 1947 y adoptaron el nombre Baytown el 26 de enero de 1948 — la planta ya se llamaba así desde hacía veintiocho años. Durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, la planta produjo gasolina de aviación de alto octanaje, buena parte del tolueno usado en explosivos por el país, y componentes de hule sintético. La Planta de Olefinas de Baytown abrió en 1979 y ha crecido desde entonces; en 2023 ExxonMobil terminó una expansión química de 2,000 millones de dólares, y en 2022 puso en marcha una de las plantas de reciclaje avanzado más grandes de Norteamérica. El complejo cubre hoy unas 3,400 acres, con cerca de dos mil empleados directos y otros tantos contratistas, y sigue apoyando a la comunidad: más de noventa años financiando a Lee College, fondos para programas STEM en Goose Creek CISD, y más de mil empleados voluntarios cada año. Muchas familias de Baytown tienen tres generaciones que han trabajado dentro de esa cerca.