Business View Magazine | April 2019

180 BAYTOWN, TEXAS B aytown, Texas is a city within Har- ris County, and partially in Chambers County, in the Gulf Coast region of the Lonestar State. Located within the Houston–Sugar Land–Baytown metropolitan area, the city lies along both State Highway 146 and U.S. Interstate 10. The area which became Baytown began to be settled as early as 1822, but its real nature was formed in the early 1900s, when Texas started becom- ing awash in oil. In 1916, the Humble Oil and Refining Company, founded by one-time Texas governor, Ross S. Sterling and his associates, built the first offshore drilling operation in Texas, and the second in the United States, in the nearby Goose Creek Oil Field. Today, the foremost driver of Baytown’s econ- omy is the downstream portion of the oil and gas sector. Whereas the upstream sector fo- cuses on the production of those two fossil fuels, downstream takes what is produced and manufactures plastics and other chemicals from the raw materials. Three main corporate anchors of Baytown are ExxonMobil, Chev- ron Phillips Chemical, and Covestro LLC. The ExxonMobil Baytown Complex, founded in 1919, is one of the world's largest industrial