BP oil refinery waste piles up on Southeast Side

Just south of the Chicago Skyway bridge, a dusty byproduct of the Canadian oil boom is piling up in huge black mountains along the Calumet River.

More is on the way. A lot more.

By the end of the year, the oil giant BP is expected to complete work on new equipment that will more than triple the amount of petroleum coke produced by its Whiting refinery on Lake Michigan. The project will turn the sprawling Indiana plant into the world’s second-largest source of petroleum coke, also known as petcoke, and Chicago into one of the biggest repositories of the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste…Please click here to read Michael Hawthorne’s story in the Tribune, or related stories on WBEZ or Chicago Tonight.