‘This is a hellhole’: Aramco makes its presence hurt in the shadow of the World Cup

The street is wide, its grass verges thick and scruffy after a week of rainstorms. Jamal Johnson will walk home straight down the middle carrying his plastic shopping bag, a jot of motion through the stillness. He lives in one of the modest wood-panelled houses spaced out on each side, most lovingly kept and passed through at least two generations. There is nobody else in sight, but a freight train breaks the silence, grinding left to right along the line flanking the north-facing gardens. The west side of Port Arthur, Texas, could be any lower-income neighbourhood in the southern states if it were not for the looming menace on the other side of the track.

This is a sad, unsettling place. “I’ve got a load of friends and family who’ve had weird diseases,” says Johnson, his face contorting at the thought. He lists a grandfather and aunt who died of cancer, the latter at a young age after relocating here to care for other relatives. An uncle died with complications from ALS (motor neurone disease). “You know what I’m saying? Man, they’ve let off all these poisonous gases; it’s like that all the time. It’s fucked up.”

Behind him and dwarfing every dwelling in view is a sprawling, otherworldly steel mass of pipes, stacks and domes. Some people say that when the chimneys flare it reflects in the clouds above Winnie, 30 miles away. This is the Motiva oil refinery, the largest in the US according to some measures. It covers 3,600 acres and last year reportedly expanded production capacity to 654,000 barrels of crude oil a day.

In 2017 Aramco, a Saudi Arabia-based company, became the facility’s sole owner. Aramco was named a “major worldwide partner” of Fifa in 2024 and is the World Cup’s exclusive energy sponsor, ubiquitous on viewers’ televisions while a heatwave rages across Europe. Its presence is hard-wired into the tournament through pitchside advertisements, stadium screens and, in the host city Houston, a bustling “Aramco Arena” inside the official fan festival. Houston will stage its seventh and final game on Saturday when Canada face Morocco in the last 16.

But there are none of these bright lights and adornments in Port Arthur, 100 miles east of Houston. This settlement of 55,000 inhabitants is on its knees. A study in 2021 named it the poorest city in Texas, with a median household income of £27,700 and home value of £49,800. Almost 30% of its population live below the poverty line and then there is the dire public health outlook. Cancer diagnoses here consistently exceed the state average: figures vary but it is widely held that the cancer mortality rate for Port Arthur’s predominantly black community is 40% higher than elsewhere in Texas. Childhood asthma rates are estimated to be almost double the national average. It is in the country’s 90th percentile for heart disease; skin problems, benign or worse, are rife.

“This is a hellhole,” says Greg Richard, another resident of this fence line community bordering the Motiva plant. Port Arthur is surrounded and, it could be argued, literally suffocated: Valero and Total also operate major refineries on its fringes but residents feel any oil boom has passed them by. “It feels like the streets should be paved with gold here,” Richard says. “But as you can see, it’s nothing like that.”

Instead Port Arthur’s residents wonder if, or when, they will be next. They know what is being released into the air around them. Emissions of benzene, which is highly carcinogenic, are among the highest in the US here. Methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide are among other pollutants from which there is little shield. While emissions are capped and monitored under Environmental Protection Agency rules, violations are common and potential long-term effects of such exposure terrifying.

This year Motiva was fined about £9,900 by state regulators after an unauthorised sulphur dioxide release in 2023. Last July they received a penalty of £43,000 for a similar offence of greater scale. Then there was the £214,000 punishment handed down in 2022, a portion of which was offset when Motiva implemented corrective measures. The bulk of that was issued for a major leak of contaminated water after a weir on their premises overflowed. These are just three of the infractions penalised before or after Aramco took control. In March an explosion at the Valero plant, which is adjacent to Motiva, was reported to have released more than 157,000 pounds of chemicals into the air over 10 days. It is no wonder local people feel they live beside a timebomb.

Hilton Kelley is an environmentalist who grew up in Port Arthur. He returned for good in 2001, channelling his energy into environmental activism after being horrified by the city’s decay and winning the feted Goldman prize for his efforts. “There was a time I could count the number of classmates whose funerals I’ve gone to,” says Kelley, who is 65. He runs through a non-exhaustive list of friends from the class of 79 who died of cancer before their time. “Jennifer Benson, she lived two blocks from Motiva and was only 25. Darlene Ford, John Lando, Eddie Brown. Cancer, cancer, cancer.”

The Guardian meets residents on the west side – which was segregated from the rest of Port Arthur until the mid-1960s under the racist Jim Crow laws – who have given up on attempting to grow vegetables outdoors because of the film that coats their produce. “I tried tomatoes, bell peppers, green beans and cucumbers, but then you look at it all and see black spots and dust,” one woman says.

What about the consequences for children here? “If you go to some of the elementary schools and talk to the nurse, she’ll open a cabinet and show you 30 or 40 nebulisers,” Kelley says. “You hear of babies who are undergoing breathing treatments.”

Charles, a carpenter who is helping to renovate his friend’s decrepit restaurant, believes he has no way out. “Once I planted so many roots here, I just prayed to God that I could survive,” he says. “I’m getting older and just can’t leave. But they’ve been killing us all our damn lives.”

“I see ghosts whenever I drive down this street.” Kelley is working his way up Houston Avenue, which runs a mile from Port Arthur’s derelict downtown to the Motiva plant’s boundary. Once upon a time they called this stretch “Little New York”. He drives past one of the numerous empty lots, some grassed over and others scattered with fragments of what once lay there. “See this? It was Antoine’s Auditorium. Aretha Franklin played here, Al Green too, Ray Charles. We had the Chi-Lites and all the other hip groups. Everything around was lit up with neon. White folks, black folks, this was the place to come. All of this was hustle, bustle.”

Kelley points to where grocery stores, nightclubs and a 7UP bottling company franchise stood before being torn to the ground. The only possible response is to take his word for it. This desolate place, an oil hub since the Spindletop discovery in 1901, was once a honeypot for locals and a multinational rotation of arrivals to the port. It sits next to some of the world’s most powerful generators of wealth. What on earth has happened here?

There is a clue later on in Kelley’s impromptu tour, at a road turning beyond Motiva’s front gate. It is early evening now, overcast with pale sun squinting through low cloud. A convoy of coaches is taking workers along highway 73 to their accommodation, which is often in hotels on the outskirts of town.

“They’re not employing people from here,” he says. “They could be, and they should be, but they’re not. Labour is cheaper coming from south of the border. And maybe they don’t complain as much as American workers if they know the situation is dangerous. It’s profit margins ahead of community members.”

The phenomenon is not new. Richard graduated in 1977 with a mechanical engineering degree and, despite living across the road from what is now the Motiva plant – then run by Texaco – he ended up taking a job in Florida for an aerospace company.

“I didn’t get an offer from anyone around here,” he says. “They had a very sorry record of hiring professionals who look like me in their organisation, and that has transferred to Motiva. You can see that in their staff and management. They come here and go back home at weekends.”

The unemployment rate in the area encompassing Port Arthur and Beaumont, which adjoins it to the north-west, is 5.4%. “We have all the infrastructure to create wealth but we are the poorest of the poor,” says John Beard Jr, a former refinery worker whose Port Arthur Community Action Network (Pacan) group has fought a long, often fruitful, set of legal battles against fossil fuel development and violations.

Beard describes Port Arthur as facing “environmental racism”. Black families who bought properties on the west side during the city’s segregation have nowhere to go. Who would want to purchase a house adjacent to an endless tangle of metal that could kill them? And even if they did, would they offer a fair price?

“Because of the petrochemicals and the pollution you’ve lost $40,000 of value in a home worth $100,000,” Beard says. “There’s a house across the street that they’re trying to sell for $175,000 and it’s been vacant for nearly four years.” Some residents claim Motiva and their peers take advantage of that vulnerability to offer buyouts for desultory rates, perhaps with a view to expanding later. “They want us away from here,” says Johnson, the pedestrian with the shopping. “They’ve been trying to buy our properties. They’re like: “Y’all going to get tired of repairing your houses and start getting the fuck away. They want to make this refinery land.”

Shirley – not her real name – lives adjacent to Motiva, close to the weir that brought Motiva that fine in 2022. She remembers the devastating consequences when Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017 and marks out the level on her wall to show how wastewater, mixed with oil, flooded the house and rose 3.5 ft.

“We had to rent for months and put the house back together,” she says. “People would be happy to leave if they offered enough money. But this is a lovely big house, I’m not going for $100,000. The market isn’t fair because of what they’ve done.” As part of a pledge to implement corrective measures, Motiva built a new protective fence in an attempt to resolve the issue with overflowing water.

The pitches at Gulf Coast Youth Soccer Club are empty but, during the season, they teem with youngsters from Port Arthur and its neighbouring towns. Beard looks over from the parking lot and sees something else missing. “Where are Aramco or Fifa on our soccer fields?” he asks. “What is their presence? They have none. If you’re so big on soccer then why aren’t you doing something where you already have a business interest?”

He wonders why Aramco have made no visible effort to improve football infrastructure or participation in their ailing back yard. “Fifa should consider the effect of taking their money,” he says. “It always has strings attached. And if they’re going to take it, they should account for the impact the company is having on its local area. It’s basically blood money.

“I’d extend the invitation for Fifa to come here. Soccer is growing here, so why can’t we see them? We don’t see any promotion in the affected communities along the fence line; there’s nothing.”

Squeezing out some broader benefit for the community from the plants’ presence has, according to Kelley, required “knocking at the door and begging”. He characterises Motiva as distant and requiring numerous hurdles to be jumped before engaging substantively. There are, however, a few encouraging signs. Kelley is pleased that Motiva has begun renovating a number of the surviving downtown buildings that were at risk of being torn to the ground, including the towering, eerie Hotel Sabine. The aim, at least in part, is that they become fit for locals’ use. He acknowledges that, and believes Motiva has made strides in curbing pollution. “It’s about 75% better than when I was growing up here and it was owned by Texaco,” he says. “But they can still be better.”

Beard is unconvinced of the upside. “There has been some improvement but I liken it to drinking half a gallon of poison rather than a gallon,” he says. “They’re better than the others to a degree but they’re still putting that crap in the air. They should be looking at reducing pollution to zero.”

Aramco and other Fifa sponsors are required to sign up to the football governing body’s sustainable sourcing code. It asks them to control and improve greenhouse gas emissions; safe discharge of wastewater is another stipulation. The code asks sponsors “to manage the environmental impacts of their activities, at least in accordance with the local and national environmental legislation, laws, and regulations of any country within which [they] operate, and to demonstrate year-on-year improvement”.

Fifa did not respond when asked whether it believed Aramco – which along with Motiva did not address questions about the allegations raised in this article – adheres to the code’s key points. Nor did it state whether Aramco’s activities in Port Arthur align with the environmental pillar of the World Cup’s sustainability and human rights strategy.

No volume of pledges, nebulous targets or carefully worded strategy documents can help Port Arthur. It is hard to see hope here without a fundamental recalibration of the fossil fuel companies’ activities and a seismic shift in their relationship with the area that makes them unfathomably rich. “We are in the belly of the beast,” Beard says. “There’s no reason for Port Arthur to be like this.”