When good leaders come on board they take the time to get to know their people — the employees who make the wheels turn for their business. But what about the other kind of “people” — the public, the community, the neighbors? For Dave Foster, refinery manager of ALON USA’s Big Spring, Texas, refinery, starting his position in April meant getting up close and personal with thousands of new friends.

“The Big Spring refinery is very important to the people in this town, so you become a community figure overnight,” he said. “You need to meet the mayor, the judge, the community advisory panel, the fire chief, the radio station, the newspaper and the television station — all in the first week.  

“What makes this easier is that people here in Big Spring and West Texas in general are just terrific people, very supportive of the refinery and very welcoming.”

Born and raised in Baytown, Texas, Foster was no stranger to an industry-friendly community. And both his father and grandfather were in the refining business, so it made perfect sense to get a chemical engineering degree from Rice University. Foster followed that up with an MBA from the University of Houston. His first job was a process engineer for ARCO Petroleum Products, and he went on to work for both Lyondell Chemical and Lyondell-CITGO Refining.

Foster took the reins at Big Spring at an interesting time in the refining industry — business is booming, but pending legislation to reduce gasoline consumption and increase ethanol production leaves some uncertainty in the air. Regardless of the state of the market, Foster is focused on several important goals, such as taking the facility’s safety programs to the next level, ensuring reliability and compliance, and improving production with a key expansion.

Learning the ropes
An integral part of ALON USA’s assets, the Big Spring refinery produces primarily gasoline, jet fuel, motor diesel and paving asphalt. The refinery has been in operation since 1929, first known as the Cosden refinery under the ownership of Josh Cosden. It was expanded significantly due to World War II efforts and a chemicals complex constructed in the ’50s and ’60s, and was purchased by Fina in 1963.

With a refining capacity of 70,000 bpd, the Big Spring refinery is the most efficient, lowest-cost refinery of its size in the United States. ALON USA — a regional marketer of gasoline and diesel through a network of approximately 1,200 locations under the FINA brand name — now owns four sour and heavy crude oil refineries in Texas, California and Oregon with approximately 170,000 bpd of capacity.

Joe Concienne, Foster’s predecessor, is now working to integrate ALON’s newest acquisitions, including a major expansion for the California refineries that the company has taken over.

Even with that full-time job, Foster said Concienne found the time to show him the ropes and meet people in and around the refinery, a key first step in being a successful leader and manager in what can be a challenging role.

“The first six weeks of being a new refinery manager are especially challenging because you have to make real-time decisions with incomplete background information, and simultaneously learn the longer-term requirements of the job, and learn the people,” Foster said. “These challenges are true for any job, but for a refinery manager position in a lean company the issues are so broad and the decisions you must make are very important to safety, environment and reliability.”

Foster credits the hard-working, conscientious nature of the refinery’s employees with helping his start go as smoothly as possible.
 
Leading these employees falls at the top of his “needed skills” list.

“This means getting the right people in the right jobs and developing them,” Foster said. “It means communicating company goals to your people at all levels, and helping them set goals that are meaningful to them and that at the same time are consistent with those of the company. It then means helping them to accomplish those goals, and how you do that varies with the individual.”

Succeeding in this endeavor requires clarity of communication, Foster said, which is more than just speaking — it is listening too, and acting on what you’ve heard.

Foster said working well with people external to the refinery — the company CEO and shareholders — is crucial, as is paying attention to the details of the facility and managing conflicting priorities.

Stepping up safety
No priority is as important as safety, and Foster has a firm grasp on the ever-present issue.

In 2006 the refinery received a safety achievement award for operating four years without a lost workday case — quite an achievement. The refinery’s recordable injury rate is average, but Foster is far from satisfied with that.

“We don’t want to be an average company in safety,” he said, “and we don’t have to be.” 

To that end, Foster is working to grow the company’s safety culture.

“We have to look out for each other, observe each other’s work habits and speak up when we see an unsafe behavior,” he said. “We have to do this even if it makes us uncomfortable sometimes. People’s pride can’t get in the way.”

A part of the community
As Foster learned his first day on the job, the refinery is a fixture in the Big Spring community. This feeds the enormous involvement of ALON and its employees in the community, which includes just about every charitable organization you can think of.

Concienne, whom Foster calls “marvelous at community relations,” played a large part in saving the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Big Spring, an indicator of true involvement and a reminder of the big shoes Foster has to fill.

In addition to the VA Hospital, Foster and the employees are keeping up the long history of contributing to the community by working with United Way, Salvation Army, Special Olympics, Junior Achievement, Girls and Boys Clubs of Big Spring, and many more charities. The facility assists with the community-wide Pops in the Park Symphony and fireworks celebration, the Howard County Fair, Keep Big Spring Beautiful, the Texas Trash-off, and even Little League sponsorships.

Changing with the times
An important issue facing the refinery is meeting the federal rule for gasoline quality and reducing the sulfur level to less than 30 ppm.

The facility had a small refiner exemption from the 2007 deadline, but with the acquisition of the West Coast refineries, it has had to fast track a multimillion-dollar project for 2009 completion.

“We currently produce against a 300 ppm limit, so this will be a big change for us,” Foster said. “The facility has a good plan in place that just needs a bit of fine-tuning.”

The refinery also plans to expand crude capacity to 75,000 bpd in fourth-quarter 2009, improving the production of all its main products.

“The modifications may also allow us greater flexibility to run lower cost crudes,” he said.

Foster said a change in crude supply might shape the future of not only his refinery, but also the industry as a whole.

There are vast quantities of lower cost tar sands crude in Canada, making it a top player in the world, right alongside Saudi Arabia and Venezuela in total reserves.

“These tar sands are not cheap to develop, but at current oil prices, they can compete well with heavy oil from the Middle East or South America,” Foster said. “With the political climate in both those areas, the United States is going to rely more and more on its friendly neighbor to the north.”

Canadian crude is making its way into the United States, Foster said. 

“Entire refineries are being revamped for Canadian crude the way refineries were revamped in the 1990s for Venezuelan crude,” he said. “The Big Spring refinery has already taken advantage of the low cost Canadian crude trend by running Cold Lake crude acquired from the Gulf Coast.”

Because Canadian crude is much more sour, refineries will have to put in more sulfur plant capacity. Importers of Canadian crude will also need the proper infrastructure to move it down here, mainly pipelines.

“The Midwest will be the first to see major refinery upgrades, but the Gulf Coast will not be far behind,” Foster said.

While the industry is in a state of flux, Foster remains committed to his top priority for the facility — to run safely and reliably, day in and day out.

“We are intensifying our focus on safe, reliable, predictable, low-cost operation and at the same time planning for improved production and yield in the future,” he said. “And all of this requires high intensity effort from each person here at Big Spring.”