[4] Later, Rinaldi was the key player behind the purchase of the former Sunoco Philadelphia Refinery, the largest oil company in the US East Coast,[5] and worked directly with the Obama administration to complete the transaction.
[6] He was dubbed "Fossil Phil" by the media for his push to make Philadelphia a large integrated energy hub to process and export oil and gas produced in the Marcellus and Bakken regions.
[8] He left Phibro to work as a senior executive for Tom O'Malley's purchase of TOSCO when it was a single-asset company and helped grow it into becoming the third largest refiner in the United States.
In 1988, Rinaldi and his partners conducted a $260 million buyout of W.R. Grace's phosphate business based in Polk County, FL and named it Seminole Fertilizer.
[11] Later, Rinaldi's Seminole merged with French investor Judas Azuelos's US fertilizer business which had purchased a 700-acre site known as the Piney Point phosphate plant on the south shore of Tampa Bay.
[13] Fertilizer plants like Piney Point produce large volumes of low-level radioactive waste due to the concentrating effect of natural radiation emitting radium found in the rocks that also contain phosphates.
This concentrated byproduct, which is enriched by a ratio of roughly 4-to-1[14] during the production of mono and diammonium phosphate fertilizers is called phosphogypsum (calcium sulfate) and has historically been used as a road bed material and as a concrete blending agent like fly-ash.
[16] Ongoing maintenance, primarily contact water treating and disposal, in addition to civil engineering management of the structure of the gypsum stack are required.
[17] In 2021, twenty years after Mulberry's bankruptcy, disaster struck with hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic effluent water leaking from the plant site into Tampa Bay causing a red-tide.
[18] The state of Florida has quoted a spend of $185 million to manage the legacy of Mulberry's Piney Point site and intends to have it be fully closed by the end of 2024.
The sale was executed as a part of Farmland's bankruptcy auction process[21] and "cleared the way for the bankrupt company, once the largest farmer-owned cooperative in North America, to pay about 60,000 creditors.
[25] Rinaldi was sued by GAF Holdings LLC with active court cases running until 2009 (via several appeals) regarding the Farmland Industrial bankruptcy and his purchase of the business.
[31] The $1.3 billion IPO effort was suspended later in 2016[32] “given the market environment, with both very low refining profitability coupled with tight Bakken spreads, it was going to be a hard story to sell to investors.
Rinaldi formed a competing company in 2019 to purchase the PES estate from bankruptcy with the intent of restarting the refinery and also building a renewable fuels business in Philadelphia.
Several different businesses would collocate to process crude oil, create petrochemicals, generate electricity, and export natural gas liquids, chemicals, and LNG.
He also led a $500 million investment to create the fastest rail offloading terminal in the United States for crude delivery from the Bakken region which is opened alongside Governor Corbett of Pennsylvania.
Only Monroe Energy continues to operate in the region, reducing what was the fourth-leading refining hub (behind Houston, New Orleans, and Los Angeles) in the United States for nearly 100-years to become a minor industry player.