Twelve refineries.
A schema is an abstraction. A refinery is a place. This page lists twelve places (eleven in the United States, one in Gujarat) that together account for somewhat more than one-third of installed atmospheric crude distillation capacity in the indexed dataset. Each is a worked example of the schema.
They are sorted by capacity. The leader is in Jamnagar, India, where Reliance operates a 704,000-barrel-per-day complex that has been the largest single refinery in the world since 2008. The largest in the United States is Motiva Port Arthur, owned by Saudi Aramco, at 636,500 barrels per day. The smallest entry in this index, Marathon Martinez, runs at 47,500 barrels per day and refines no crude at all; it converted to renewable fuels in 2024.
Nelson Complexity Index figures are reported where the operator discloses them or where the configuration is well-enough known to derive an estimate. Status reflects the dataset as of the date below.
| № | Refinery | Operator | Location | Capacity | NCI | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| I. | Jamnagar | Reliance Industries | Jamnagar, Gujarat | 704,000 | 14.0 | Operating |
| II. | Port Arthur | Motiva (Saudi Aramco) | Port Arthur, Texas | 636,500 | 14.7 | Operating |
| III. | Beaumont | ExxonMobil | Beaumont, Texas | 630,000 | 11.8 | Operating |
| IV. | Garyville | Marathon Petroleum | Garyville, Louisiana | 596,000 | 11.7 | Operating |
| V. | Galveston Bay | Marathon Petroleum | Texas City, Texas | 593,000 | 15.3 | Operating |
| VI. | Baytown | ExxonMobil | Baytown, Texas | 584,000 | 14.2 | Operating |
| VII. | Baton Rouge | ExxonMobil | Baton Rouge, Louisiana | 520,000 | 12.5 | Operating |
| VIII. | Whiting | BP | Whiting, Indiana | 435,000 | 11.4 | Operating |
| IX. | Port Arthur | Valero Energy | Port Arthur, Texas | 395,000 | 15.0 | Operating |
| X. | Bayway | Phillips 66 | Linden, New Jersey | 258,500 | 13.6 | Operating |
| XI. | Los Angeles | Phillips 66 | Wilmington, California | 139,000 | 14.2 | Closing |
| XII. | Martinez Renewable Fuels | Marathon Petroleum | Martinez, California | 47,500 | 3.0 | Renewable diesel |
Capacities are rated atmospheric crude distillation, barrels per calendar day, as reported in /refineries.json. Each refinery carries a full profile in the directory.
Reading the table
Capacity tells you how much crude can flow through the front of the plant in a day, but it does not tell you what comes out the back. Nelson Complexity Index is the second column to read. A simple hydroskimming refinery scores around four. A modern conversion refinery scores in the high tens. Galveston Bay scores 15.3 because Marathon operates a full conversion train there: a deep-cut coker, a hydrocracker, a delayed-coking unit, and several hydrotreaters. Whiting at 11.4 is a simpler asset by comparison, even though it processes more than fifteen percent more crude than Bayway. Complexity, not capacity, drives margin per barrel.
The two rows at the bottom are not the smallest assets in the index. They are the most instructive. Phillips 66 Los Angeles at 139,000 bpd is a high-complexity Wilmington refinery announced for closure in October 2024 and shut down by the end of 2025; the site will be redeveloped. Marathon Martinez Renewable Fuels at 47,500 bpd was, until 2023, a conventional Carquinez Strait petroleum refinery; Marathon converted it. Its Nelson Complexity dropped from a typical petroleum figure to three. It now charges soybean oil, tallow, used cooking oil, and distillers corn oil rather than crude oil. These two rows demonstrate what the schema is built to express: the asset persists across change.
One refinery in the index is not in the United States. Reliance Jamnagar, on the Arabian Sea in Gujarat, has been the world's largest single refinery since its second-train commissioning in 2008. It belongs in the index for scale, for global reference, and for one quiet structural reason: the schema does not assume an American site.