The short and plain version
- "Downstream" means the plant side of oil and gas: the refineries and chemical plants that turn crude into fuel and products. The wellsite side is called "upstream."
- Texas refines more crude oil than any other state, and the biggest refineries in the country sit on the Texas Gulf Coast.
- These plants run on contract labor, and the law treats contract workers differently. That is why the lawyer you pick matters.
- The big plant dangers: explosions and fires, poison gas releases, falls, confined spaces, and heat.
- A "turnaround" is a planned shutdown for major maintenance. Contractors pour in by the hundreds, and the risk spikes with them.
- Refineries run under federal process safety rules. Those rules exist because past plant disasters killed workers. The rules also create records, and records show what companies knew.
- After a plant injury, more than one company is usually responsible. Finding all of them is one of the first jobs.
1. Upstream versus downstream: what a refinery is
A refinery is a city of steel that never sleeps. It runs hot, under pressure, around the clock, and it runs on contract labor. And when one of its units comes down for maintenance and hundreds of contractors pour through the gate at once, the danger concentrates: one place, one schedule, everybody working around the same pipes.
Most of this guide lives on the wellsite, the drilling and fracking side of oil and gas. The industry calls that side “upstream” (finding oil and gas and getting it out of the ground). This page is about the other end of the system, the side the industry calls “downstream.” Plenty of workers get hurt inside a plant instead of on a rig, and the plant side plays by its own rules.
"Downstream" is the industry's word for the refining and processing side of oil and gas: the refineries, petrochemical plants, and processing facilities that turn crude oil and gas into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and chemicals. The wellsite is "upstream." The pipelines and trucks in between are "midstream."
A "refinery" is a plant that cooks crude oil under heat and pressure and separates it into usable products. Picture towers ten stories tall, miles of pipe, furnaces, pumps, and tanks holding enormous amounts of flammable material, all of it running around the clock. On any given day, a big share of the people working inside the fence are contractors, hired by somebody other than the company whose name is on the sign.
And Texas is the capital of all of it. As of January 1, 2025, the federal government counted 132 operable refineries in the United States. Together they can process about 18.4 million barrels of crude every single day, and no state holds more of that capacity than Texas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Refinery Capacity Report. The two biggest refineries in America both sit on the Texas Gulf Coast: Motiva’s plant in Port Arthur and Marathon’s Galveston Bay plant in Texas City. South Texas has its own plant country too, the refinery row around Corpus Christi and Valero’s plant at Three Rivers, about an hour down I-37 from San Antonio.
So if you got hurt inside a plant instead of on a rig floor or a lease road, this page is yours. The bones of your case will look familiar, contractors, layered companies, Chapter 95, but the rule book changes, and the change matters.
2. The hazards inside a plant
The wellsite kills fast and mechanical: pipe, weight, pressure, trucks. The plant has all of that, plus something the wellsite mostly does not: enormous inventories of flammable, toxic material held under heat and pressure a few feet from where people work.
Explosions and fires. A refinery exists to cook flammable liquids and gases, so containment is everything. Containment fails in ordinary ways: a corroded pipe, an overfilled tower, a valve that should have been replaced two inspections ago. Then the escaping vapor drifts until it finds an ignition source, and in a plant it usually finds one. The burns that come out of those fires are their own subject, covered in the burn injuries guide.
Toxic releases. The product itself is poison. Sour crude carries hydrogen sulfide, the same gas that kills wellsite workers, and it shows up in refinery streams and vessels too (the full picture is in the H2S guide). Benzene, a cancer-causing chemical, runs through crude and gasoline streams. And some plants run their alkylation units on hydrofluoric acid, one of the most dangerous chemicals in industrial use. A release can hurt a worker in seconds or over years, and both kinds of injury are real.
Falls. A plant is vertical. Towers, pipe racks, tank stairs, and during maintenance, scaffolding stacked stories high. When a plank, a guardrail, or a fall-protection plan is wrong, gravity does the rest.
Confined spaces. During maintenance, workers go inside the equipment: towers, drums, tanks, exchangers, vessels that spent the last several years full of hydrocarbons. The air inside those spaces can kill, and federal law says nobody enters until it is tested and controlled.
A "confined space" is a space big enough to enter and work in, hard to get into and out of, and never meant for people to stay in: tanks, towers, drums, vessels, pits. Federal rules call the dangerous ones "permit-required" confined spaces, because the air inside can be poisoned, explosive, or empty of oxygen. Before anyone goes in, the law requires the air to be tested (oxygen first, then flammable gas, then toxic gas), a trained attendant posted outside, and a real rescue plan. Guessing is not on the list.
Heat. Add the Gulf Coast summer to the furnaces, the radiant steel, and the flame-resistant clothing (FRs) a plant requires, and heat becomes its own hazard. Heat illness is real, it can kill, and it gets waved off as “part of the job” more than anything else on this list.
Every one of those dangers exists somewhere on a wellsite too. The plant difference is scale: more material, more pressure, more workers packed inside one fence, so when something lets go, it can hurt a whole crew at once.
3. Turnarounds and the contractor surge
A refinery is never more dangerous than when it is changing state. Running steady, the plant is a sealed system. During a turnaround, the seal comes off.
A "turnaround" is a planned shutdown of a refinery unit so it can be inspected, repaired, and rebuilt. Each unit gets one every few years, it can run for weeks, and it is enormous. A plant can bring in hundreds or even thousands of extra contract workers: boilermakers, pipefitters, welders, scaffold builders, insulators. Many are travelers seeing that unit for the first time. The plant loses money every day the unit is down, so the schedule pressure is real and every worker on the job feels it.
Now think about what that means in practice. Lines that stayed sealed for years get opened. Vessels get entered. Welding and grinding (what the industry calls “hot work”) happens all over a plant built out of flammable material. Cranes swing loads over working crews. The “struck-by” and “caught-between” dangers that kill wellsite workers are just as alive inside a plant (that guide is here).
The two most instructive refinery disasters in recent memory both happened at exactly those moments.
Texas City, 2005. On March 23, 2005, at BP’s refinery in Texas City, a distillation tower was overfilled during the startup of a unit coming back from repair work. Flammable liquid erupted out of an outdated blowdown stack that vented to the open air instead of a flare. The vapor cloud found an ignition source. The explosions killed 15 workers and injured 180 more. All 15 of the dead were contractors. Most were in or around temporary office trailers parked near the unit, supporting turnaround work on a neighboring unit. Nobody had warned the people in those trailers that the unit next door was starting up. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board (the federal agency that investigates chemical disasters) concluded the causes ran through every level of the corporation. That plant is still running in Texas City today, under a different owner.
Superior, 2018. On April 26, 2018, the Husky Energy refinery in Superior, Wisconsin was shutting a unit down for a turnaround. A vessel failed and exploded, throwing metal debris across the plant. One piece tore open an asphalt tank. The fire that followed put smoke over the city, and much of the town was told to evacuate. Thirty-six people were hurt. The CSB’s final report said it plainly: this could have been prevented.
Read those two dates again. One disaster came during a startup after maintenance. The other came during a shutdown for maintenance. The most dangerous days in a plant’s life are the days it goes to sleep and the days it wakes up, and those are exactly the days when the most contractors are standing inside the fence.
The official numbers make refineries look safe. Read them next to the disasters.
In 2024, the federal count showed 7 deaths across the whole petroleum and coal products manufacturing industry. The recordable injury rate was 1.0 case per 100 full-time workers, one of the lower rates in American manufacturing. Now put that next to one afternoon in Texas City in 2005: 15 dead and 180 hurt in a single event, and every one of the dead was a contractor. Here is how both things can be true. The federal fatality count classifies a death by the worker's employer. So a contractor killed inside a refinery is generally counted under his employer's industry, construction or specialty services. His death never shows up in refining's numbers at all. And a plant can post years of low slip-and-fall numbers while the equipment that causes catastrophes decays in place. The CSB found exactly that at BP Texas City: the company was watching its personal injury rates improve while the systems that prevent explosions fell apart underneath.
Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Industries at a Glance, Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing (NAICS 324), 2024 fatality count and injury rates; U.S. Chemical Safety Board, BP America (Texas City) Refinery Explosion, final report (2007).4. Process safety: the rules built after past disasters
Everything in the last two sections was known before you were born. The industry has been blowing up units and burying workers for generations, and the rules that exist today were written piece by piece after each disaster. The lawyers call them regulations. I want you to think of them as receipts.
The backbone is a federal OSHA standard called Process Safety Management, and it exists, in the government’s own words, for “preventing or minimizing the consequences of catastrophic releases of toxic, reactive, flammable, or explosive chemicals.”
"Process safety management," or PSM, is the federal OSHA standard (29 CFR 1910.119) for preventing catastrophic explosions, fires, and chemical releases at facilities that handle large amounts of highly hazardous chemicals. Refineries are the classic example. Personal safety is about hard hats and harnesses, one worker at a time. Process safety is about keeping the plant itself from becoming the weapon.
The federal government finished that standard in 1992, after a string of catastrophes in the 1980s. One of them was a 1989 explosion at a plastics plant in Pasadena, Texas that killed 23 workers. Here is what it requires, in plain words. A process hazard analysis (a formal study of everything in a unit that can fail and kill somebody, done before it does). Mechanical integrity (inspecting and testing the pressure vessels, pipes, valves, relief systems, alarms, and pumps on a schedule, and writing the results down). Management of change (before a plant changes its equipment, chemicals, or procedures, it has to study what that change could break). Hot work permits (a written permit before anybody welds or grinds near a covered process, documenting that fire protection was in place first). Plus written operating procedures and real training to go with all of it.
And the standard speaks straight to the contractor question. The plant that brings a contractor in has legal duties of its own. It has to check the contractor’s safety record before hiring it. It has to tell the contract employer about the fire, explosion, and toxic release dangers connected to the work. And it has to explain the plant’s emergency plan. The contract employer has duties too: train its people on those dangers and document that the training actually happened. The confined space rule works the same way. Before a contractor’s crew enters a permit space, the host plant has to tell the contractor what makes that space dangerous and what has gone wrong in it before. When crews overlap, the plant has to coordinate the entry. So when a plant shrugs and says your safety was somebody else’s problem, understand that the federal rule book says otherwise, by name, in writing.
When the rules got ignored, the government said so. After Texas City, on the CSB’s recommendation, OSHA launched a National Emphasis Program aimed at refineries. Inspectors went plant to plant across the country checking process safety compliance.
One more thing about process safety, because it is bigger than any one lawsuit. These plants sit next to neighborhoods. The blast wave at Texas City did not check anybody’s badge, and the smoke at Superior did not stop at the fence line. A company that cuts process safety corners is gambling with its workers first and with the whole town second. And the people who make that bet are never the ones standing next to the pipe.
If some of this sounds like the plant you were in, the permit that got signed without anybody looking, the inspection that was overdue, the contractor briefing that never happened, it may be worth a free conversation. No pressure and no obligation.
Call or text (210) 460-05695. Who is responsible after a refinery injury
Walk through a refinery gate during a turnaround and read the hard hats. You might count a dozen company names before you reach the unit. So when somebody gets hurt, the honest question is never just “what happened.” It is “which companies’ choices let it happen,” and at a plant the answer is usually more than one:
- The plant owner or operator, if it controlled how the work was done and knew about the danger and failed to warn.
- The turnaround general contractor, if it ran the schedule, the permits, or the coordination that broke down.
- Another contractor on the job, if its crew created the danger: the crane lift over your head, the dropped load, the line that was never cleared.
- The companies responsible for inspection, equipment, or gas detection, if the thing that failed was theirs to catch.
- Your own employer, which is a separate question with its own rules, especially in Texas, where employers are not required to carry workers’ comp at all.
Now the law you will hear about, and you should hear it straight. Texas has a statute, Chapter 95 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code, that protects property owners from many lawsuits by contract workers hurt while working on improvements to the owner’s commercial property. A refinery is exactly the kind of property it covers. This is not a wellsite-only law. Two of the Texas Supreme Court’s most important Chapter 95 decisions came out of plant work: a worker burned by a gas leak while working on a furnace system, and an insulation worker exposed to asbestos at a chemical plant. To recover from a protected property owner, the injured worker generally has to prove two things at the same time: 1) the owner exercised or retained some control over how the work was done, AND 2) the owner actually knew about the danger that caused the injury and failed to adequately warn. One is not enough. You have to have both. It is a steep hurdle. But it is not a brick wall, and it protects only the property owner, not every company inside the fence. The full breakdown is in the Chapter 95 guide.
And think about what a refinery is required to write down. Hazard analyses. Inspection and test records on the exact equipment that failed. Management of change files. Hot work permits with names and dates on them. A plant documents its own knowledge year after year because federal law makes it. Whether that paper adds up to what Chapter 95 requires depends on the facts of your case. But it is exactly the kind of evidence a qualified lawyer asks for early, while it still exists and before anybody has a reason to misplace it.
A short, plain summary of Texas Supreme Court decisions that shape plant injury cases. This is legal background, not a prediction about any specific case.
- Ineos USA, LLC v. Elmgren (2016) was a plant case: a contractor's employee was burned by a gas leak while working on a furnace system. The Court held that Chapter 95 protects the property owner itself, not the owner's individual employees or agents. The statute applies when the injury arises from the condition or use of the same improvement the worker was working on. A connected system, like a plant's linked furnaces and piping, can count as a single improvement. But that is a fact question courts decide case by case, not an automatic rule, and which equipment the danger came from can decide whether the statute applies at all. And a general awareness that a plant contains hazards was not actual knowledge of the specific danger.
- Abutahoun v. Dow Chemical Co. (2015) arose from insulation work on a pipeline system at a chemical plant in Freeport. The Court held that Chapter 95 applies to all independent-contractor negligence claims that satisfy the statute's applicability section, including claims based on the property owner's own negligent activity happening at the time of the work. So switching the label on the claim usually does not get around the statute.
- Mobil Oil Corp. v. Ellender (1998) upheld exemplary (punishment) damages against a plant owner after a contract worker died from benzene exposure. The gross negligence test the Court applied is the same one Texas uses today, now written into the exemplary damages statute: the conduct must involve an extreme degree of risk, the company must actually know about that risk and go forward anyway, and it must be proved by "clear and convincing" evidence (a higher bar than an ordinary injury claim). The Court explained that a corporation can be grossly negligent through its "vice principals" (officers and managers). Evidence that a company took some care does not automatically defeat a gross negligence finding. The jury heard evidence the company monitored and protected its own employees against benzene while doing far less for the contract workers doing the same kind of work.
The plain takeaway: Texas courts treat plants the way they treat the rest of the oil patch. The shield is real, the shield has limits, and the companies outside the shield answer for their own choices.
6. What this means for you and your family
Here is the plain version of everything above.
If you were hurt inside a refinery or a plant, you were probably a contractor, and you are probably surrounded by companies that all say safety was somebody else's job. Federal law says otherwise. The plant had duties. Your employer had duties. The company running the turnaround had duties. Somewhere in that stack, somebody skipped one, and that is usually why you are reading this page.
So do not let anyone tell you a plant explosion or a gas release was just bad luck. These plants are governed by safety rules that were written because workers died. When the rules are followed, the disasters mostly do not happen. When somebody cuts a corner to keep the schedule, workers and their families pay for it, and the person who made that choice was sitting in an office, nowhere near the pipe.
Keep what you have. Your badge records, your training sign-offs, any permits you have copies of, the names of the people working next to you. Small things now become big things later.
And you do not have to decide anything today. But answers cost nothing, and the plant's lawyers started working the day it happened.
If you were hurt inside a Texas refinery or plant, or you lost someone in one, call me. The conversation is free and private, and I will be straight with you: whether you have a case, what Chapter 95 means for it, which companies belong in the conversation, and what I would do next if it were my family.
Call or text (210) 460-05697. Questions to ask any lawyer you are considering
You do not have to take anybody’s word, including mine. Test any lawyer you talk to. These questions will tell you fast whether they know plant work.
- Ask what "PSM" is and which of its records they would request first in a plant case. If they have to look it up, that tells you something.
- Ask how they would identify every company on the turnaround: the general contractor, the specialty crews, the staffing agencies, and who signed the permits.
- Ask what Chapter 95 is and how it applies to a claim against the plant owner.
- Ask how they would preserve the plant's records, the hazard analyses, the inspection histories, the permits, and the alarm data, before those things get harder to get.
- Ask about their experience with plant and oilfield cases, whether they work with experienced co-counsel when needed, how the fee works, what expenses they cover up front, and what happens if the case does not recover.
A lawyer who knows this work will not be bothered by those questions.
If you want help, here is how to get it.
Free consultation. No fee unless we win. We can talk by phone, or in person by appointment in San Antonio. The conversation is confidential and there is no obligation.
Call or text (210) 460-0569Or use the contact form on this page.
For the ones who keep going.
Common questions
What does "downstream" mean? +
"Downstream" is the industry's word for the refining and processing side of oil and gas. Upstream is the wellsite, where oil and gas come out of the ground. Downstream is where crude gets turned into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and chemicals. That means the refineries and plants. The pipelines and trucks in between are called midstream.
How is a refinery injury case different from a wellsite case? +
The bones are the same. You still have layers of companies, workers hired by contractors, and Texas's Chapter 95 in the background. What changes is the rule book and the paper. Refineries fall under a federal process safety rule. That rule requires hazard studies, equipment checks, hot work permits, and written procedures. So a plant case usually has a deeper paper trail showing what the companies knew. The defendants change too, from operators and drilling companies to the plant owner and the turnaround contractors. A qualified lawyer treats the two as different animals from day one.
What is a turnaround and why is it dangerous? +
A "turnaround" is a planned shutdown of a refinery unit for major maintenance and repair. It can last weeks. It can bring hundreds or even thousands of extra contract workers into the plant at once. It is dangerous because everything unusual happens at the same time. Equipment gets opened up. Workers go inside tanks and vessels. Welding happens near flammable material. Cranes swing loads overhead. And everybody works long hours under schedule pressure, because a unit that is down is losing the company money. Federal investigators have tied major refinery disasters to shutdowns and startups. The 2005 BP Texas City explosion happened during a startup.
What is process safety management? +
Process safety management, or "PSM," is the federal OSHA rule for preventing huge explosions, fires, and toxic releases at plants that handle large amounts of dangerous chemicals. Refineries are the classic example. The rule requires hazard studies and the inspection and testing of key equipment. It requires permits for hot work, safe procedures for making changes, and training. It also sets duties for the plant and the contractor when contract crews work inside. Every requirement in it is a lesson somebody already paid for.
Who is responsible after a refinery explosion? +
Usually more than one company. Depending on the facts, that can include the plant owner, the turnaround general contractor, and other contractors working nearby. It can also include the companies in charge of inspections or equipment, and the makers of parts that failed. Your own employer is a separate question with its own rules. One of the first jobs in any plant case is sorting out which companies' choices caused the harm. Doing that right takes the plant's own records.
Does Chapter 95 apply at a refinery? +
Generally, yes. Chapter 95 is a Texas law that protects owners of commercial property from many lawsuits by contract workers. Courts have applied it at plants and refineries for years. Two of the Texas Supreme Court's leading Chapter 95 cases involved plant work. But the law protects only the property owner. A worker can still recover from the owner by proving the owner controlled the work, actually knew about the danger, and failed to adequately warn of it. And the other companies in the plant never had that protection in the first place.
Keep reading
Burn Injuries on Texas Oilfields: Flash Fires, Explosions, and Pipeline Ruptures
Flash fires, explosions, and pipeline ruptures cause some of the worst oilfield injuries. Here is how they happen and who is liable.
Part 10Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S): The Invisible Danger on Texas Oilfields
H2S is the invisible oilfield poison that can kill in two breaths. Here is what exposure does and what your rights are after it.
Part 12Struck-By and Caught-Between Injuries: The OSHA Fatal Four on Texas Oilfields
Struck-by and caught-between incidents are the leading on-site oilfield killer. Here is how they happen and who can be held responsible.