The transition to clean energy is necessary and urgent, both for fighting climate change and for reversing a long history of pollution and environmental injustice in fossil fuel producing communities. California has been a national leader in climate action and clean energy, setting ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and investing in scaling up renewable energy industries and infrastructure. The state’s leadership has unleashed market forces that are already in motion: California leads the country in electric vehicle registrations1 and is one of the top producers of renewable energy nationwide.

Meanwhile, the petroleum industry has been a fixture of the local economy in Contra Costa County, in the East Bay region of California, since the first refinery began operations in 1896 in the city of Rodeo. Contra Costa is a hub of refining for Northern California, home to four of the five Bay Area refineries. As California advances toward its goal of reducing carbon emissions to combat climate change, the refinery industry and the local economy in Contra Costa face an uncertain future. Refinery closures are already happening—in 2020, the Marathon Martinez refinery announced it would idle and laid off over 750 workers. The announcement was shocking and painful for workers and their families, many of whom had worked at the refinery for multiple generations. People wondered if Marathon’s idling heralded more imminent refinery closures.

In the aftermath of the Marathon layoffs, local labor and community groups formed the Contra Costa Refinery Transition Partnership (CCRTP), supported by the California Workforce Development Board’s High Road Training Partnerships program. The goals of the CCRTP are to understand what changes in refinery operations are on the horizon and what it will mean for Contra Costa workers and communities, and to inform a strategy for navigating these changes in a way that leads to a fair and just transition.

In the fall of 2020, amidst the pandemic and historically unprecedented unemployment, a large oil refinery in the Bay Area abruptly shut down after 107 years of continuous operation. Weathering two world wars, the 1918 global pandemic, the Great Depression, and the Great Recession, the economic conditions of 2020 were deemed too hazardous to surmount by Marathon refinery executives. Following the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, the refinery had been idled due to plunging demand for gasoline under the state’s stay-at-home order. In August 2020, the company announced that the Martinez, California, facility would cease refining oil altogether. Among the murmured reasons for the plant closure, executives gestured to the impending impact of climate change policy on the fossil fuel industry. The facility, the company announced, would be converted to a renewable diesel processing unit. On October 30, 2020, Marathon executives permanently shut down all oil refining activity at the facility, laying off several hundred workers, including 345 union refinery workers and nearly as many contract and management employees.

Apart from the specific reasons for the Marathon shutdown, the refinery’s closure provides an empirical window into the impacts of a shrinking fossil fuel industry on fossil fuel workers more broadly. Put another way, the Marathon plant closure serves as a proxy for climate change policies aimed at transitioning a regional economy away from fossil fuels. Analyzing the socio-economic impacts of the Marathon refinery shutdown on workers provides a baseline of information about the probable impact of economic de-carbonization on a region’s fossil fuel workforce. In this case, the refinery’s location within Contra Costa County provides sightlines onto a process of transition within a diversified regional economy. Of the three oil refining regions in California, Contra Costa and Los Angeles Counties are similar in this regard. Kern County, by contrast, represents a heavily oil-dependent and non-diversified regional economy.

The aim of this study is to capture and analyze the post-layoff experiences of workers at the Marathon refinery in the Bay Area. In particular, the study focuses on the labor market experiences of laid-off workers, including workers’ post-layoff employment status, job search, and wages. How successful were workers in finding new jobs after layoff? In what industries or occupations did they secure employment? How did their refinery skills and experiences translate to new employment opportunities? How do workers’ post-layoff wages compare to their pre-layoff wages? Did workers relocate to find new jobs? In short, are workers better or worse off after losing their jobs at the refinery?

The experience of these workers sheds light on future transition experiences of fossil fuel workers. An informed understanding of these experiences can assist policy makers, workforce development agencies, labor, and others in designing policies and programs that effectively support workers through periods of economic transition. This study makes a unique and highly significant contribution to this endeavor—most notably because its findings are drawn from workers’ actual experiences of job loss and transition. This study offers a rare empirical look at how workers navigate the constraints and opportunities of the labor market during a period of transition. It captures both the behavior of workers (what jobs they seek and take) and employers (what jobs they offer and workers they hire). Other studies of fossil fuel workers and transition provide information about workers’ aspirations and desires or simulate job matching in a local economy. Albeit illuminating, the clearest, most unequivocal information about how workers will fare during a transition—and what decisions they will make or are forced to make—comes from analyzing behavior, decisions, and outcomes during an actual economic transition. The Marathon refinery shutdown provides just such a case