Essays
From the Drums
52 essays on Baytown, Texas, one for each week of the year, written from inside the town rather than about it: what the plants are for, why the refinery never stops, who dug the channel, what the salt under Mont Belvieu holds, how a shift town keeps its holidays. Read them in order or start anywhere; the first is "The plant has no New Year".
01
The plant has no New Year
A refinery is a continuous process. Unlike a bakery or a foundry, which work in batches, a crude unit takes oil in one end and sends gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and chemical feedstock out the other without pausing, often for years between planned shutdowns called turnarounds. In Baytown, the ExxonMobil complex on the Houston Ship Channel runs through midnight on New Year's Eve exactly as it ran the night before; stopping is the expensive and dangerous thing, not running.
02
What a barrel is
A barrel of oil is 42 US gallons, about the volume of a full bathtub and roughly 300 pounds of crude. The size comes from the wooden tierce cask, adopted as the standard by Pennsylvania oil producers in 1866. Oil has not shipped in actual barrels for over a century; it moves by pipeline and tanker. A refinery distills each barrel into roughly 20 gallons of gasoline, a dozen of diesel, a few of jet fuel, and a smaller share of feedstock that becomes plastics, foam, paint and fabric.
03
Who dug the channel
The Houston Ship Channel opened in 1914 after Harris County and the federal government split the cost of dredging Buffalo Bayou to 25 feet. The names on the record are merchants, engineers and the president who fired the opening cannon by button from Washington; the crews who lived aboard the cutter-suction dredges for years are mostly unrecorded. The channel has since been deepened to more than 40 feet and is dredged continuously, because the bay fills it back in.
04
The salt under Mont Belvieu
Mont Belvieu, Texas sits on the Barbers Hill salt dome, a column of Jurassic sea salt that rose through denser rock over more than 150 million years. Caverns leached into the salt with fresh water, some as tall as a skyscraper, hold ethane, propane and butane under pressure, displaced in and out by brine. Together they form the largest natural-gas-liquids storage hub in the United States, operated by Enterprise Products, Energy Transfer and Targa, and a reference point for US propane and ethane prices.
05
When the grid went dark
In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri froze gas wells, pipelines and power plants across Texas. Grid frequency on ERCOT fell below 59.4 Hz for more than four minutes, near the point where generators trip and a weeks-long collapse begins, so the operator ordered rolling outages on purpose. Baytown, home to one of the largest refineries in the country, sat in the cold like everyone else while ship-channel plants shut down and flared.
06
Sunday night, day shift
Stadium lights run on electricity made at the moment it is used: a gas turbine, a jet engine bolted to the floor, burns natural gas to spin a generator 60 times a second in step with every other generator on the grid. Texas runs its own grid, ERCOT. The gas was processed on the Gulf Coast, its heavier parts stored in the Mont Belvieu salt caverns or cracked into ethylene, which becomes the screen, the turf and the cooler. Baytown's plants run on twelve-hour shifts through the game.
07
The chemistry of a rose
Ethylene (C2H4) is a plant hormone: a cut rose makes it from an amino acid, senses it through a copper-bearing receptor, and drops its petals on the signal. Florists fight it with cold, receptor blockers and distance from ripening fruit. The same molecule is the world's most-produced organic chemical, made on the Houston Ship Channel at Baytown by cracking ethane at 800–900 °C, and becomes polyethylene, polyester, antifreeze and the sleeve the rose is sold in.
08
Aristotle's word
The word "energy" comes from Aristotle's Greek coinage energeia, from en (in) and ergon (work): being-at-work, the thing actually happening, as opposed to dunamis, what could be. Thomas Young brought "energy" into physics in 1807 for a moving body; William Rankine added "potential energy" in 1853, welding Aristotle's two opposites into one phrase. In a refinery town the old meaning is still visible: crude in the tank is potential; the running plant is the word itself.
09
Texas before oil
Before 1901, Texas had no fuel to speak of. The republic declared on March 2, 1836 ran on longhorn cattle walked north to Kansas, cotton shipped out through Galveston, schooners on Galveston Bay, and the work of horses, oxen and human backs. Spindletop (1901) and then the Goose Creek field near Baytown changed not whether Texas had energy but where it was kept: in the ground instead of in that year's grass.
10
Clocks and the sun
In Baytown, Texas, the sun is highest about 20 minutes after clock noon on standard time and about 1:20 p.m. on daylight time, because Central Time is set to the 90th meridian near New Orleans and Baytown lies about five degrees of longitude west of it. The railroads created the zones in 1883; Congress made them law in 1918. A continuous-process plant, meanwhile, ignores the spring-forward hour entirely: only the operator's shift gets shorter.
11
Fifty miles to the sand
From Baytown, Galveston is about 50 miles and an hour by SH 146 over the Fred Hartman Bridge and down the west side of the bay. The longer back way runs east on I-10, south to High Island (a hill because of the salt dome under it), then west along Bolivar Peninsula past the old lighthouse to the free TxDOT ferry into Galveston. On the beach, sand heats fast and water slowly, and that difference drives the afternoon sea breeze that reaches Baytown by mid-afternoon.
12
The tilt of the earth
The earth has seasons because its axis leans about 23.4 degrees, not because its distance from the sun changes (we are actually closest in January). On the March equinox the sun rises due east everywhere, including over Galveston Bay at Baytown, and stands about 60 degrees high at solar noon; in June it reaches about 84 degrees and in December only about 37. Lengthening days, not warmth, are what send migrating songbirds north across the Gulf.
13
The pelicans over the tankers
Brown pelicans almost disappeared from the Gulf coast in the 1960s because DDT, concentrating up the food chain, made their eggshells too thin to incubate. After the 1972 ban the shells thickened, chicks hatched, and the species was removed from the endangered list in 2009. Today they fish Galveston Bay and the Houston Ship Channel beside the tankers, and you can watch them dive from the pier at Bayland Park in Baytown.
14
Nothing is destroyed
Conservation of mass says that in a chemical reaction atoms are rearranged, not created or destroyed; Antoine Lavoisier established it in the 1780s by weighing sealed reactions before and after. An ethylene cracker, like the olefins plant on the Houston Ship Channel at Baytown, runs the same proof around the clock: every pound of ethane in is accounted for as ethylene, hydrogen, methane, coke or water out. The plant calls it the material balance.
15
Who pays for the chalk
Texas has no state income tax, so public schools are funded mainly by local property tax plus state aid. In Goose Creek CISD and Barbers Hill ISD the most valuable taxable property is industrial: the ExxonMobil Baytown complex on the Houston Ship Channel and the natural-gas-liquids caverns and fractionators at Mont Belvieu. County appraisal districts value them each year, the district applies a rate per $100, and property-wealthy districts send part of what they collect back to the state under recapture.
16
Eighteen minutes next door
The Battle of San Jacinto was fought on April 21, 1836, on the plain where the San Jacinto River meets Buffalo Bayou, directly across the Houston Ship Channel from Baytown. Sam Houston's army attacked Santa Anna's camp during siesta; the fighting lasted about eighteen minutes, Santa Anna was captured the next day, and the Republic of Texas stood for nine years before statehood. San Jacinto Day is observed the Saturday nearest April 21, and the free Lynchburg Ferry lands beside the battleground.
17
Earth Day in a refinery town
Earth Day in Baytown, Texas, lands in a town whose largest employers are the refinery and chemical plants on the Houston Ship Channel. The town has its own environmental history: the Brownwood subdivision sank from groundwater pumping and became the Baytown Nature Center, brown pelicans returned to Galveston Bay after DDT was banned in 1972, and the flare over the plant is a safety device, not a leak, governed by rules that date to the first Earth Day in 1970.
18
Baytown en español
About half of the households in Baytown, Texas, speak Spanish at home, and the city is majority Hispanic. Cinco de Mayo marks the 1862 Battle of Puebla, not Mexican independence; Baytown's bigger celebration is Grito Fest on Texas Avenue in mid-September, which draws about 5,500 people. The Spanish came first: Galveston Bay is named for Bernardo de Gálvez, and San Jacinto was a saint's name before it was a battle.
19
Mother's Day on a twelve-hour shift
Mother's Day falls on the second Sunday in May, and in Baytown, Texas, it is a workday for many mothers: the labor-and-delivery unit at Houston Methodist Baytown (the only one in town), the refinery and chemical plants on the ship channel, and the restaurants all run through it. The essay describes five composite women on shift and compares a household to a continuous process, staffed every hour and most dangerous when it stops.
20
Cap, gown, hard hat
In Baytown, Texas, many graduates of the three Goose Creek CISD high schools (Sterling, Lee and Goose Creek Memorial) and Barbers Hill go next to Lee College, the community college founded in 1934, for roughly two-year programs in process technology, instrumentation and welding, and then to jobs at the refinery and chemical plants on the ship channel. The essay follows that path from the graduation stage to the first day inside the fence.
21
The fuel that won the war
During the Second World War the Humble Oil refinery in Baytown, Texas, made 100-octane aviation gasoline, and Humble was among the largest producers of it in the world. Octane measures how much a fuel can be compressed before it ignites on its own; 100-octane let aircraft engines run higher compression and more supercharger boost, giving Allied fighters more power at the same weight. Tankers carried it out of Galveston Bay through a Gulf patrolled by U-boats in 1942.
22
What the bay remembers
Baytown, Texas sits at the head of Galveston Bay, a shallow bay that narrows toward the town. Hurricane winds push water into the bay from the Gulf, and shallow, funnel-shaped water has nowhere to go but up, which is why surge here is worse than the sheltered geography suggests. Hurricane Alicia (1983) ended the Brownwood subdivision, Ike (2008) brought major surge, and Harvey (2017) dropped over 50 inches of rain on parts of the Houston area.
23
Flags on the tower
A flare stack is a chimney built to burn off gas safely when a refinery unit has to release pressure; a pilot flame burns at the tip at all times so any gas that arrives is lit in open air rather than allowed to gather. Along the Houston Ship Channel at Baytown, flags fly at plant gates and sometimes from tall structures near those stacks. A flag flaps because a thin sheet in steady wind is aerodynamically unstable, and plants read wind the same way, with windsocks.
24
Freedom, fifty miles east
Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and had General Order No. 3 read, announcing that all enslaved people in Texas were free, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. The order also declared that the relationship between former masters and slaves "becomes that between employer and hired labor." Texas made Juneteenth a state holiday in 1980; it became a federal holiday in 2021. Galveston is about an hour south of Baytown on SH 146.
25
My father's lunchbox
A refinery or chemical-plant operator in Baytown, Texas works twelve-hour rotating shifts keeping a continuous process running: watching temperatures, pressures and levels on a unit that never shuts down, even on holidays. Behind the plant fence on the Houston Ship Channel, crude oil is distilled by boiling point and hydrocarbons are cracked at 800–900 °C into ethylene, the starting point of most plastics. This essay tells that job from home, on Father's Day.
26
The longest day and the sun that made the oil
Yes, in a literal sense: crude oil is stored sunlight. Hundreds of millions of years ago, plankton in shallow seas used photosynthesis to turn sunlight into sugars and fats. They died, sank into oxygen-poor mud, were buried, and were cooked at 60–120 °C in the "oil window" into hydrocarbons. A refinery on the Houston Ship Channel does not make energy; it releases that ancient sunlight by distilling crude and cracking it at 800–900 °C.
27
Fireworks are chemistry
Fireworks get their colors from metal salts packed into pellets called stars: strontium burns red, barium green, sodium yellow, copper blue, and strontium mixed with copper gives purple. Heat lifts electrons in the metal atoms to higher energy levels; as they fall back they emit light at wavelengths specific to each element, the same fingerprints astronomers read in starlight. Blue is the hardest color because the copper compound breaks down if the star burns too hot.
28
The kerosene in the rocket
Yes: the first stage of the Saturn V and the first stage of a Falcon 9 both burn RP-1, which is kerosene refined to a tight specification — low sulfur, a narrow boiling range, few molecules that leave carbon deposits — because the fuel also cools the engine walls before it burns. Kerosene is a distillation cut of roughly C10–C16 hydrocarbons, drawn off a refinery tower between gasoline and diesel. The Saturn V's first stage carried about 200,000 gallons of it.
29
A hundred degrees
Air conditioning does not make cold; it moves heat from inside a building to outside, using a compressor that must be paid for with work, usually electricity from natural gas. On the Texas coast the air is so humid that sweat barely evaporates, which is why a hundred degrees in Baytown feels worse than in a desert. The white plumes over the plants on the Houston Ship Channel are cooling towers doing the same thing: evaporating water to carry heat away.
30
What the flare is saying
A refinery or chemical plant flare is a tall pipe with pilot flames at the top, connected to relief valves throughout the plant. When pressure rises past what a vessel is built for, the valve opens and the gas burns at the stack instead of venting unburned or bursting the vessel. A small steady flame means the plant is holding; a large, loud flame means a startup, shutdown or upset is being relieved; black smoke means the gas is burning without enough air.
31
First day, three high schools
Baytown, Texas has three public high schools, all in Goose Creek CISD: Ross S. Sterling, Robert E. Lee and Goose Creek Memorial. Mont Belvieu, up SH 146, is served by Barbers Hill ISD, which sits over the largest natural-gas-liquids storage caverns in the country. The refineries, tank farms and chemical plants on the Houston Ship Channel are taxed, and those taxes fund the districts; Lee College, the town's community college, runs programs that lead directly to plant jobs.
32
A town that turns itself into light
Ethylene is made by steam cracking: ethane (or naphtha) is mixed with steam and heated in furnace tubes to roughly 800–900 °C for a fraction of a second, where it loses two hydrogens and becomes ethylene (C2H4) plus hydrogen. The gas is quenched, compressed and separated by chilling to about −100 °C. Baytown's ExxonMobil complex includes one of these plants; the ethylene goes on to become polyethylene, PVC, polyester and polystyrene.
33
Harvey, and the year after
Hurricane Harvey made landfall in late August 2017, weakened, drifted back over the warm Gulf and stalled over the upper Texas coast for days. Some Houston-area gauges recorded more than 50 inches of rain. On the flat, clay-bottomed coastal plain around Baytown that water had nowhere to go but sideways. Neighbors with boats moved first; afterward the region raised houses, redrew flood maps and funded the ditches and detention ponds that hold water before it reaches living rooms.
34
Labor Day in a labor town
A turnaround is the planned period, scheduled years ahead, when a refinery or chemical unit is shut down, opened, inspected, repaired and restarted. It is done mostly by contract trades — welders, pipefitters, scaffold builders, insulators, inspectors — who travel from plant to plant. In Baytown a turnaround brings a few thousand workers to town for weeks, filling hotels and RV parks, and then they leave. The plants themselves never close, including on Labor Day.
35
The fence
Plant security on the Houston Ship Channel changed after September 11, 2001. Federal port-security law (2002) and later chemical-facility rules added background-checked credentials for waterfront workers, cameras, vehicle barriers and slower gate checks. A refinery is guarded not because it is valuable but because of the supply chain that runs out from its gate — jet fuel, diesel, propane and the feedstock for medical plastics — to people who never see it.
36
El Grito on Texas Avenue
Grito Fest is Baytown's Mexican Independence Day celebration, held in mid-September on Texas Avenue in the downtown ACE District and drawing about 5,500 people. The night ends with a re-enactment of the Grito de Dolores, the call to revolt Father Miguel Hidalgo raised in Guanajuato on September 16, 1810. Baytown also sits across the ship channel from San Jacinto, where Texas won independence from Mexico in 1836 — two independence days, five months apart.
37
The universe looking at itself
Carl Sagan's line "we are a way for the cosmos to know itself" means that the carbon and iron in a human body were made in stars, and that a person is star material arranged so it can study stars. Aristotle's word energeia, being-at-work, is the root of "energy." A refinery operator on a distillation tower in Baytown, reading temperatures and pressures at 3 a.m., is doing both: a piece of the world keeping another piece in balance.
38
Where the wind comes from
A norther, or blue norther, is a cold front: a shallow wedge of dense cold air, hundreds of miles wide, that slides south off the plains and lifts the warm humid Gulf air above it. The wind turns from south to north in minutes, pressure rises, the dew point can fall twenty degrees, and on Galveston Bay the north wind pushes water out toward the Gulf, exposing mudflats — what anglers call a blowout tide.
39
The bridge
The Fred Hartman Bridge, opened in 1995, carries State Highway 146 over the Houston Ship Channel between Baytown and La Porte. It is a cable-stayed bridge: straight cables in tension run from two towers of roughly 440 feet to the deck, which is held in compression about 175 feet above the water. It replaced the Baytown Tunnel, which lay on the channel bottom and blocked deepening the channel for larger ships.
40
The neighborhood that became a marsh
Brownwood was a Baytown, Texas subdivision on a peninsula in Galveston Bay. Groundwater pumping lowered pressure in the sand-and-clay aquifers beneath it, the clay layers compacted, and the land sank several feet over the twentieth century. High tides and storms flooded the streets, and after Hurricane Alicia in August 1983 the neighborhood was abandoned. The land is now the Baytown Nature Center, a birding peninsula whose trails still cross old curbs and pavement.
41
Fire, controlled
A refinery flare stack burns gas that a plant cannot safely hold when a pump trips, a valve sticks or a unit has to be emptied fast. The gas runs to a tall pipe where a pilot flame is always lit, and it burns in open air instead of over-pressuring a vessel. In Baytown, Texas, the flares on the Houston Ship Channel are among the largest managed flames most people will ever stand near.
42
Goose Creek's first gusher
The Goose Creek oil field, on the west side of Baytown, Texas, produced from about 1908 and boomed in 1916–1917. Because the field ran under Goose Creek and Tabbs Bay, drillers built derricks on pilings over the water, one of the first offshore-style fields anywhere. Pumping caused the land to sink, an early textbook case of subsidence. Humble Oil built its refinery nearby in 1919–1920, and the town of Baytown grew around it. Goose Creek CISD takes its name from the creek.
43
The chemistry of a glow stick
A glow stick is a plastic tube holding an oxalate ester and a fluorescent dye, with a glass vial of hydrogen peroxide inside. Snapping the tube breaks the vial; the peroxide reacts with the ester to form an unstable ring that falls apart into carbon dioxide, releasing energy that the dye emits as light. This is chemiluminescence: light without heat. The dye sets the color. Cold slows the reaction and dims it; warmth brightens it and shortens its life.
44
Remembering, on the bay
Día de los Muertos falls on November 1 and 2, the same days as All Saints and All Souls. In Baytown, Texas, where about half of households speak Spanish at home, an ofrenda holds marigolds, candles, water, a photograph, pan de muerto, sugar skulls and the dead person's favorite food. The essay reads the holiday through the town's own habit of handing work on shift by shift: to remember the people who dug the channel and built the refinery is to keep the thing they built running.
45
The birds know the way
The Baytown Nature Center holds Birding Week each November on the peninsula where the Brownwood subdivision stood before it sank and was abandoned after Hurricane Alicia in 1983. Migrating birds arrive over Galveston Bay, many having crossed the Gulf of Mexico non-stop on stored fat. There is a small per-person admission and no pets past the gate except service animals; the trails and ponds are walkable in an hour or two.
46
Veterans on the tower
A large share of operators at the Baytown-area plants are veterans, though no public count exists. The reason is fit: a Navy engine room is a process unit with boilers, turbines, pumps and alarms run in rotating watches, and Army fuel specialists and generator mechanics already do energy work. The plants need people who can stand a shift, hand off at a boundary, and trust an instrument over a feeling, which is what the services train.
47
The turkey and the tank
Natural gas feeds the world in two ways. It burns under the oven, and it supplies the hydrogen for the Haber-Bosch process: methane is split with steam into hydrogen, the hydrogen is pressed together with nitrogen from the air over an iron catalyst to make ammonia, and ammonia becomes the fertilizer that grows the corn a turkey eats. Roughly half the nitrogen in a living human body today has been through that reactor.
48
Gratitude, precisely
Three numbers keep an ordinary house running. The Texas grid holds 60 cycles per second, and the figure falls the instant load exceeds generation. Texas requires a boil-water notice when water pressure drops below 20 psi, because soil can seep into a pipe that is no longer pushing outward. A hospital's emergency generators must pick up critical loads within ten seconds of losing the grid. In February 2021 all three numbers failed at once.
49
The parade down Texas Avenue
Baytown, Texas holds its Christmas parade on Texas Avenue, downtown in the ACE District, on the first Thursday of December, after dark. Fire trucks, police motorcycles, the marching bands of Sterling, Lee and Goose Creek Memorial high schools, church and dance-studio floats, car clubs and Santa pass in about an hour. Folding chairs go out on the curb by mid-afternoon; the plants on the ship channel keep running through it.
50
The physics of a string of lights
An LED Christmas light is a sliver of semiconductor crystal; when current pushes electrons across the junction into "holes" on the other side, each one gives off a photon whose color is set by the crystal. Almost none of the energy is lost as heat, so a hundred-bulb string draws a few watts where an old filament string drew dozens. The electrons in the cord never leave the copper; the push comes from a generator, in Texas mostly a natural-gas turbine.
51
The shortest day
At Baytown's latitude, about 30° N, the winter solstice day is a little over ten hours long, with the noon sun only about 37 degrees above the bay. The earliest sunset comes at the start of December and the latest sunrise well into January; the solstice is the balance point, not the bottom of both, because Earth's slightly elliptical orbit and its tilt shift solar noon against the clock by seconds a day.
52
Christmas on the night shift
Refineries and chemical plants like the ExxonMobil Baytown complex do not shut down for Christmas. A refinery is a continuous, hot, pressurized process; units are stopped only for planned turnarounds that take days to weeks, and startup and shutdown are the riskiest phases, so steady operation is the safe choice. Operators work twelve-hour rotating shifts, and trade holidays among themselves, so some hundreds of people are on site on Christmas Eve.