PBF Energy Brand Guidelines: The 2008 Refiner With Six Plants and No Branded Outlets

A name made of its backers.

PBF Energy is named after the companies that started it. English Wikipedia says it was formed in 2008 as a joint venture of the European refiner Petroplus and the private-equity firms Blackstone and First Reserve, and that the three letters stand for their names. Its corporate office is in Parsippany, New Jersey, and it also lists an office in Calgary, according to its website. In September 2010 Petroplus announced plans to sell its stake to its partners, English Wikipedia says.

The company was built by buying refineries rather than building them, and its first was one that had been shut. The Delaware City refinery, commissioned in 1956 and run in turn by Getty Oil, Texaco, Star Enterprise, Motiva, Premcor and Valero, was closed by Valero on 20 November 2009, according to the Wikipedia article on the refinery. Its sale to PBF was announced in June 2010, and PBF announced on 7 October 2011 that the restart had been completed. The site covers more than 5,000 acres on the Delaware River, and PBF describes it as able to process a heavy slate of high-sulphur crudes.

Two more plants followed in 2010. PBF bought the Paulsboro refinery in New Jersey, about 30 miles north of Delaware City on the same river, from Valero, and in December 2010 bought the Toledo refinery in Ohio from Sunoco, English Wikipedia says. PBF describes Paulsboro and Delaware City as working together as one East Coast system. The company went public in December 2012.

From the Gulf Coast to California.

The next purchases took PBF south and west. In 2015 it bought the Chalmette refinery outside New Orleans from ExxonMobil and its partner, Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA, together with interests in chemical plants and pipelines at the site. In July 2016 it bought ExxonMobil’s refinery at Torrance, California, with stakes in pipelines and terminals. In June 2019 it agreed to buy Shell’s refinery at Martinez, 30 miles north-east of San Francisco, and the sale was completed on 1 February 2020, according to English Wikipedia; Oil & Gas Journal names the seller as the Shell subsidiary Equilon Enterprises.

That gave PBF six refineries in five states — Delaware, New Jersey, Ohio, Louisiana and California — with a combined throughput capacity of about 1,000,000 barrels a day, the company says. By its own figures the largest single site is Chalmette, at 185,000 barrels a day, and Martinez, a dual-coking refinery on an 860-acre site, is the most recent addition. Toledo, PBF says, takes light crudes from Canada, the Mid-continent, the Bakken region and the Gulf Coast, mainly by pipeline. Its products include gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and heating oil, and some sites have their own lines. Paulsboro makes lubricant base oils and process oils sold under the name of the Paulsboro Refining Company as “VP” oils, and asphalt; Toledo makes petrochemicals such as nonene, xylene and toluene alongside its fuels, according to PBF’s product and refinery pages.

PBF has also moved into renewable diesel through a partner. On 28 June 2023 PBF and Eni Sustainable Mobility announced the closing of a 50-50 joint venture, St. Bernard Renewables, which owns a biorefinery next to the Chalmette refinery in Louisiana, according to the announcement as published by Biodiesel Magazine. The plant makes mainly hydrotreated vegetable oil, known in North America as renewable diesel, using the Ecofining process that Eni developed with Honeywell UOP; the existing Chalmette refinery’s operations and ownership were unaffected.

How refiners present themselves.

Refiners and fuel marketers sit between the oil field and the driver, and their identities have to work at very different scales. The same name may appear on a refinery gate, the side of a tanker truck, a forecourt canopy, a pump display, a lubricant bottle and a page of an investor presentation, so marks tend to be simple shapes and short words that survive distance, weather and night lighting.

Much of the public image is still built on the forecourt. Station brands carry the colour and the logo, while the company behind them may run several names at once: Phillips 66, for example, says it sells fuel in the United States under the Phillips 66, Conoco and 76 brands and in Britain under JET. Payment cards, loyalty schemes and apps extend the forecourt to the phone; Phillips 66 promotes one app, Fuel Forward, across its three US brands.

Lubricants give refiners a second, shelf-sized identity. Bottles and drums are often sold under their own names rather than the corporate one, such as Indian Oil’s Servo or Phillips 66’s Kendall, and they sit beside competitors in shops and workshops, where a pack has to be recognised quickly.

The newest part of the story is told in announcements and reports. Companies present renewable diesel, sustainable aviation fuel and electric-vehicle charging through press releases, sustainability pages and investor material; Phillips 66 describes converting a California refinery to renewable fuels, and Indian Oil has added charging points at its fuel stations. Safety pages, refinery photographs lit at night and annual reports complete a register that is usually more technical than the forecourt. The guides in this group set out what can be checked about each company: its origins, owners, plants and brands.

Three initials, no forecourt.

PBF does not sell fuel under its own name at the pump. It calls itself one of the largest independent refiners and suppliers of “unbranded transportation fuels” in the United States, and its website says plainly that “PBF does not have company owned, operated or branded outlets”: its products reach customers through a network of dealers and wholesalers. Its other public face is its logistics arm, PBF Logistics, which the company says runs pipelines, terminals, storage, marine facilities, truck racks and rail links serving its refineries, including more than 500 miles of active pipeline. Products leave its plants by ship, barge, pipeline, truck and rail, the company says.

A fire broke out at the Martinez refinery on 1 February 2025; in July 2025 PBF said the refinery was partly running again, producing limited quantities of gasoline, jet fuel and intermediates, and planned a full restart of the remaining units by the end of 2025, Hydrocarbon Processing reported. In January 2026 Oil & Gas Journal reported that PBF had postponed full operations again, citing a wider scope of repairs and equipment delays, and that the company expected to reach planned operating rates by the beginning of March 2026, after partial operations at a reduced rate since the second quarter of 2025. In its third-quarter results of 29 October 2026, PBF said the Martinez refinery had returned to full operations in May 2026.

For a design guide, PBF Energy shows a refiner whose identity sits upstream of the pump, in plants and pipelines rather than forecourts. Compare Valero, which sold PBF its Paulsboro and Delaware City refineries, and HF Sinclair, another independent US refiner. For this guide we use a harbour navy and a steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep PBF Energy’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.