The pollution controls applied only to newly constructed facilities. So, as long as those refineries remained uncompetitively inefficient, and continued to process their target light sweet crude, they were not required to comply with the new standards.

Unfortunately, the owners of bigger refineries made massive investments to cut costs by becomng more efficient, and changes so they could process the heavy sour crude that was flooding the market at much lower prices, and while they were at it, expanded the capacity of each refinery.

And as the Carter initiated energy efficiency measures ground on even as Reagan told people to spent more money on burning money-I mean oil, cars used less gas, power plants burned less oil, and the price of oil products fell through the floor, and below the marginal cost of those refineries closed.

So, pollution controls only forced the shutdowns if you call the sulfer, metals, and waxes in the crude that would clog the refinery equipment and poison the catalysts to be controls on the pollutions the crude could contain.

In microeconomic terms, some of the refinery owners failed to invest in innovation, failed to respond to the market fast enough, and thus suffered the "creative destruction of the free market." The fact is, these refineries without the burden of pollution controls couldn't compete with refineries that had the state of the art pollution controls. Ultimately, pollution is waste and waste is inefficiency and inefficiency is uncompetitive.

A better explanation for the reason the plants closed was the price of oil and gas was too low.