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In 2021, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District adopted a new regulation that requires petroleum refineries, within five years, to reduce the amount of particulate pollution released from their fluid catalytic cracking units, the equipment that processes crude oil into finished products such as gasoline.

Catalytic cracking units are key for motor fuel production.

The EPA requires plants to restrict small particulate matter emissions to 1 pound or less for every 1,000 pounds of coke burned in a refinery's catalytic cracking units.

Starting last month, several flights from Tehran have brought materials to Venezuela to help it restart the catalytic cracking unit at its 310,000 barrel-per-day Cardon refinery, drawing U.S. condemnation.

Marching past the towering catalytic cracking towers and vast oil drums of a Shell petrochemical plant in Norco, Sonita Singh, an assistant professor of public health at Louisiana State University, considered the reenactment an opportunity to “recontextualize neocolonialism.”