Bungalows and oil tanks: The environmental damages of petroleum refining and the urban politics of heavy industry

Oil refineries are important nodes in the infrastructure of petroleum, transforming crude oil into marketable products. They are often implanted far from dense urban centers because of the nuisances they bring. But sometimes they are found in cities, confronting the cleanliness and the efficiency of the modern infrastructural ideal with the pollution and toxicity that oil refining entails. The eastern end of the island of Montréal used to be Canada’s refining capital, hosting six oil refineries during the 20th century. To understand the torn historical legacy of oil refining, this paper uses both archival documents and oral history interviews with former residents to analyze the social and environmental consequences of fossil energy metabolisms on urban sacrifice zones. While recognizing the health and environmental hazards of living near and working in oil refineries, residents of Montréal’s sacrifice fossil zone were also attached to the industry for reasons going beyond jobs and cash. Living in a sort of fossil company town, they benefited from union jobs, generous municipal services financed by oil revenues, and the positive image of petroleum during the postwar era. By linking environmental history and urban studies, this article reflects on their experiences and on the complex politics of heavy industry in a major North American city. It argues that fossil infrastructure has been anything but concealed and invisible in Montréal’s refining landscapes, where the materiality of petroleum has been a quotidian and multisensorial reality, bringing about industrial pollution and fossil pride.