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Christopher Sellers, Petropolis and Environmental Protest in Cross-National Perspective: Beaumont–Port Arthur, Texas, versus Minatitlan-Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, Journal of American History, Volume 99, Issue 1, June 2012, Pages 111–123, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jas080
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Driving into Port Arthur or Beaumont, Texas, at night, you encounter a horizon ablaze with the lights of the strange cityscape that is the modern oil refinery. Near the mouth of the Neches River, the refinery’s clumped and turreted towers, erected by some of the nation’s largest corporations—Gulf, Texaco, and Mobil—have punctuated the skyline for over half a century. American historians now know much about the boomtowns that rapidly grew around early oil fields and also about the immense impacts of gasoline on twentieth-century American lives, but they sometimes fail to recall that refineries, too—the oil industry’s version of the factory—have cast a long historical shadow.
Cracking and fractionating incoming streams of crude oil into saleable commodities, larger refineries such as those in Beaumont and Port Arthur have quietly spawned their own distinctive environmental transformations. Drawing neighborhoods of petrochemical plants their way and nourishing new residences and commerce, the long-term local impact of refineries in this corner of Texas suggests the phenomenon of petropolis. Petro- refers to an industrial specialization in oil refineries and petrochemical plants, drawing on technologies that inevitably resembled one another no matter where they arose. The term -polis suggests another commonality: the buildup of not just a downtown but also a metropolitan area, uniting core cities with satellite towns via a regional economy dominated by nonrural jobs and land uses.
