Hydrogen fluoride (HF) is a chemical that’s used in the production of gasoline. It is extremely dangerous. About 42 refineries across the United States use HF as part of the process of making gasoline, even though safer alternatives are readily available.
HF can destroy skin, tissue, and bone on contact. Exposing as little as 2.5 percent of a person’s skin to HF (about the size of one’s hand) can lead to death. When inhaled, HF can fatally damage lungs, disrupt heart rhythms, and cause other serious effects.
Dangers of using HF in refineries
Refineries store tens of thousands—often, hundreds of thousands—of pounds of HF on-site. If HF is released into the air from a refinery pipe or vessel at normal atmospheric conditions, its unique chemistry leads it to vaporize, mix with moisture in the atmosphere, and form a dense, ground-hugging, toxic fog that can travel for miles. About 19 million people live close enough to an HF refinery that they could potentially become caught in such a deadly vapor cloud. Many more live along the trucking and train routes that bring HF from its sole manufacturing facility in Louisiana to refineries all over the United States.
In 1987, a release of at least 30,000 pounds of HF from a refinery in Texas sent more than 1,000 people to the hospital, many of whom went on to suffer long-term damage to their health. Since then, there have been at least 81 smaller-scale HF releases from the alkylation units at U.S. oil refineries. There have also been at least two near miss events—in which a catastrophic explosion nearly released massive amounts of HF— in just the last decade.
Why file a Toxics Substances Control Act petition about HF?
We submitted a legal petition to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on February 11, 2025, under the Toxic Substances Control Act. This petition sets out the facts establishing why the EPA must establish regulations to prohibit the use of HF in domestic oil refining to eliminate the unreasonable risks that this use presents to public health and the environment. We filed the petition with our partners: Clean Air Council and Communities for a Better Environment, groups dedicated to protecting people from pollution in the Mid-Atlantic and California, respectively.
Some individual refineries—like the Trainer Refinery near Philadelphia and the ExxonMobil Joliet Refinery in Illinois—put more than a million people in danger of an HF release, according to the refineries’ own estimates. Many more leave hundreds of thousands of people in harm’s way. Critically, there’s no reason to leave so many people in danger. There are safer alternatives in use at most other refineries in the United States. Some refineries have even started or finished the process of converting away from HF to safer, modern alternatives.
What we hope the petition will accomplish
On May 12, 2025, the EPA denied the petition and refused to start a regulatory process to eliminate the unreasonable risk that refineries’ use of HF presents to public health and the environment. We now have the option of going to court and asking a judge to rule that refinery use of hydrogen fluoride presents an unreasonable risk, which the EPA must eliminate through regulation.
Refineries using HF for alkylation
Under the Clean Air Act’s Risk Management Program (RMP), refineries that use HF for alkylation have to report basic information to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency every five years. RMP information is crucial for planning for and mitigating risk, including providing emergency response plans and advancing the facilities’ accountability to maintain safeguards for employees and the public. The table below summarizes refinery owners’ submitted information for all 42 U.S. refineries (as of December 2024) that currently use HF for alkylation, including refinery locations, an estimate of how much HF the refinery could release in a “worst-case” scenario, and the number of people living within the worst-case scenario zone who could encounter a poison cloud in case of such a release. More detailed information can be found for each refinery in the petition at appendix A.
Incidents at U.S. refineries that use HF for alkylation (1987–present)
In 1987, a refinery in Texas released a large cloud of toxic HF that injured more than 1,000 residents. HF is used in various industries, including by companies that refine petroleum through a process called alkylation. When exposed to moisture, HF is also called hydrofluoric acid (HA). The colorless chemical is extremely corrosive and dangerous to human health. NRDC has compiled recorded incidents from 1987 to the present at the 42 U.S. refineries that still use HF for alkylation in the table below. These incidents encapsulate the continued risk of accidental releases, explosions, and other dangerous failures at refineries that continue to utilize this chemical. Because not every release or other incident at refineries is recorded, this database is almost certainly an underestimate of this history.
Original article online at: https://www.nrdc.org/court-battles/hydrogen-fluoride-refineries