About Calumet Energy Team Power Station Chicago Illinois
The Calumet Energy Team Power Station sits in the Calumet neighborhood on the far South Side of Chicago, an industrial corridor defined for over a century by steel mills, petroleum refineries, and power generation infrastructure. The facility reportedly generates approximately 156 megawatts (MW) and has operated in its current configuration since 2002. ENGIE North America Inc. owns and operates the plant as a wholly owned subsidiary of ENGIE SA, the French multinational headquartered in Paris with power generation, natural gas distribution, and energy services operations across more than 70 countries.
The Calumet facility is part of a contiguous Mississippi River and Lake Michigan industrial corridor that stretches from the Chicago–Gary–Hammond industrial complex southward along the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers into Missouri. This corridor includes some of the most asbestos-intensive industrial facilities in the United States.
The physical infrastructure underlying modern facilities in the Calumet industrial corridor carries decades of accumulated industrial activity dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including oil refining and gas processing operations, petroleum storage and transfer systems, electrical power generation and distribution, and steel manufacturing and finishing operations. Power stations and petroleum processing facilities that operated throughout the twentieth century accumulated substantial quantities of asbestos-containing materials (ACMs) reportedly installed for heat insulation, fireproofing, gasket fabrication, and electrical applications. When modern facilities acquire or renovate older industrial infrastructure — as occurred at the Calumet site — workers may have encountered legacy asbestos-containing materials installed decades before current ownership took effect.
Workers who performed construction, renovation, maintenance, and decommissioning activities at or near this site — spanning potentially from the mid-twentieth century through the present — may have been exposed to asbestos-containing materials integral to the facility’s historical industrial systems.
General Equipment at Calumet Energy Team Power Station Chicago Illinois
The equipment below represents the systems and infrastructure documented or typically present at this facility during the era when asbestos-containing materials were specified in industrial construction. This is general facility-equipment reference — not a legal attribution of any specific product, manufacturer, or exposure event to this facility. Material-category and manufacturer information is addressed in the AsbestosIndex Product Crosswalk linked under the records table below.
Documented Asbestos Evidence
The records below are verified, state-documented asbestos removals at this facility. Each entry represents a regulated abatement project where the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (Illinois EPA) was notified under federal NESHAP rules, the work was logged, and the asbestos-containing material was confirmed and removed under regulated conditions. These are not allegations or estimates — they are paper records tying documented asbestos-containing material to this specific site.
Material Categories in Documented Records
The materials documented above (and similar asbestos-containing materials commonly encountered in records of this type) appear in the AsbestosIndex catalog with historical manufacturer and trust-fund information. Click a category to view manufacturers historically associated with that material:
Who May Have Been Exposed at Calumet Energy Team Power Station Chicago Illinois
Insulators — also called insulation workers or laggers — are among the most heavily exposed workers documented in the occupational medicine literature and in decades of asbestos litigation. Members of Heat and Frost Insulators Local 1 (St. Louis, MO) and Heat and Frost Insulators Local 27 (Kansas City, MO) have filed substantial mesothelioma claims for alleged exposures at comparable Midwestern industrial facilities, including power stations and refineries along the Mississippi River corridor.
Reported exposure pathways at facilities comparable to Calumet: Mixing and applying asbestos-containing thermal insulation to boiler casings, steam lines, and turbine equipment; cutting and fitting asbestos-containing pipe covering — producing visible dust clouds of respirable asbestos fiber; removing and replacing damaged or deteriorated asbestos-containing insulation during maintenance shutdowns; working in enclosed spaces — boiler rooms, turbine halls, pipe chases — where fiber concentrations may have been highest; and handling bulk asbestos-containing insulating cement, asbestos cloth, and asbestos rope.
Pipefitters and steamfitters at power generation and petroleum processing facilities worked directly on the high-pressure steam and process piping systems that represented the densest concentration of asbestos-containing materials.
Critical Filing Deadline & Next Steps
Illinois law gives mesothelioma and asbestos-disease claimants 2 years from the date of medical diagnosis to file a personal-injury lawsuit (735 ILCS 5/13-202). For wrongful-death claims after an asbestos-related death, the filing window is 2 years from the date of death (740 ILCS 180/2). The two deadlines run on separate tracks — preserving one does not extend the other.
The personal-injury clock runs from diagnosis, not from exposure. Mesothelioma latency is typically 20 to 50 years, so workers exposed in the 1950s–1980s are being diagnosed today.
Practical first steps
- Document what you remember. Pay stubs, W-2s, union cards, photographs, coworker names, and dates of employment. The WorkChain widget on this page can save a copy you can email yourself.
- Preserve medical records. Pathology reports, biopsy results, imaging, and pulmonary-function tests are central to both civil claims and trust-fund filings.
- Identify household members. Spouses who laundered work clothing and children of plant workers are eligible for secondary-exposure claims when diagnosed with an asbestos-related disease.
- Speak with an asbestos attorney with Illinois experience. The first conversation is free and confidential. Asbestos trust-fund claims and civil claims run on different tracks — both can be pursued in parallel.
Asbestos-Related Diseases
Asbestos fiber exposure can cause several specific diseases that typically appear decades after the original exposure. The latency period — the gap between exposure and diagnosis — usually runs 20 to 50 years. That's why workers exposed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s are receiving diagnoses today.
Mesothelioma
A rare, aggressive cancer that affects the lining of the lungs (pleural mesothelioma), abdomen (peritoneal), or heart (pericardial). Mesothelioma is almost exclusively caused by asbestos exposure, which is why a mesothelioma diagnosis often points directly to historical workplace exposure. Average latency from first exposure to diagnosis is 30-50 years.
Asbestosis
A chronic, non-cancerous scarring of lung tissue caused by inhaled asbestos fibers. Asbestosis causes progressive shortness of breath, persistent cough, and reduced lung function. It does not improve with treatment, and it is a recognized basis for compensation under most trust schedules and civil claims.
Lung Cancer
Asbestos exposure significantly increases the risk of lung cancer, particularly when combined with a history of smoking. Asbestos-related lung cancer is compensable under the same trust schedules and civil claim avenues as mesothelioma.
Other Recognized Diseases
Pleural plaques, pleural thickening, laryngeal cancer, ovarian cancer, and certain gastrointestinal cancers are also recognized as asbestos-related under various trust schedules and case-law authorities, though eligibility and proof requirements vary by claim type.
If you have any of these diagnoses and you worked at this facility, lived with someone who did, or were exposed in any documented capacity, you may have a claim worth pursuing. Speak with an attorney before assuming you don't qualify.
Cross-State & Regional Corridor Workers
The Mississippi River and Lake Michigan industrial corridor stretches from the Chicago–Gary–Hammond industrial complex southward along the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers into Missouri, including facilities such as Granite City Steel / U.S. Steel (Granite City, IL), Shell Oil / Roxana Refinery (Wood River, IL), Clark Refinery (Wood River, IL), Laclede Steel (Alton, IL), Labadie Energy Center (Franklin County, MO — Ameren UE), Portage des Sioux Power Plant (St. Charles County, MO — Ameren UE), Rush Island Energy Center (Jefferson County, MO — Ameren UE), and Monsanto Chemical Company (St. Louis County and Sauget, IL).
Workers throughout this corridor frequently traveled between facilities for maintenance shutdowns, turnarounds, capital projects, and union dispatch assignments. Members of regional labor unions — including Heat and Frost Insulators Local 1 (St. Louis), UA Local 562 (St. Louis), and Boilermakers Local 27 (St. Louis) — may have worked at multiple facilities along this corridor during their careers, accumulating asbestos exposure from each job site across both Missouri and Illinois.
Data Sources
Information about facility equipment, industrial materials, and occupational records referenced on this page is drawn from publicly available sources where applicable, including:
- EPA ECHO Facility Compliance Database — enforcement and compliance records for industrial facilities
- OSHA Establishment Search — federal workplace inspection history
- EIA Form 860 Plant Data — power-plant equipment and ownership records (where applicable)
- Illinois Environmental Protection Agency NESHAP asbestos abatement notification records
- Published asbestos trial and trust fund records (publicly filed court documents)
- AsbestosIndex Product & Manufacturer Crosswalk — historical asbestos-containing product schedules linked to manufacturers
If specific equipment or product claims in this article are sourced from a non-public database, the source is identified parenthetically within the text above.