Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Par Pacific Holdings, Inc.
Par Pacific runs a network of fuel refineries, pipelines, and gas stations, mostly in Hawaii and the western United States, making money by turning crude oil into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel that people and businesses buy.
Par Pacific is an energy company that refines crude oil into the fuels people actually use — gasoline for cars, diesel for trucks, and jet fuel for planes — and then sells them through its own network of gas stations and terminals. It owns refineries in Hawaii, Washington, Wyoming, and Montana, plus a system of pipelines, storage tanks, and retail stations, mostly in the western United States and the Pacific Islands. The company makes money because refining is a spread business: it buys raw crude oil, processes it, and sells the finished fuel for more than the cost of that crude plus the cost of running the refinery. When that gap widens, profits jump; when it shrinks, profits collapse.
The Hawaii side of the business is unusual and important. Island fuel markets are protected by geography, since shipping fuel in from far away costs money, so a refinery already sitting there has a real advantage. Par Pacific sells fuel in Hawaii under the Hele and nomnom brands and supplies jet fuel to airlines, and it also moves refined products through terminals and pipelines. On the mainland, it runs refineries that sell into regional fuel markets and operates a chain of convenience stores and gas stations. So it is part oil refiner, part fuel distributor, and part convenience-store operator, all stitched together around getting fuel from a refinery to a pump or a plane. Refining is a famously cyclical, capital-hungry, low-margin business with large swings in earnings. A small change in the crude-to-fuel spread moves the needle massively, and competition comes from bigger independent refiners like Valero, Marathon Petroleum, and Phillips 66, who can spread fixed costs over far larger volumes. Par Pacific's edge is geography and integration — its refineries sit in markets where shipping costs protect it, and owning the terminals and stations that sell its output keeps more of the value inside the company rather than handing it to a middleman.
The company has used its cash flow to grow by buying refineries and related assets, most notably its Hawaii operations, which transformed it from a small regional player into a larger integrated fuel company. That growth brings real scale but also more debt and more exposure to one volatile industry. The thing to watch is the refining spread and whether Par Pacific can keep its refineries running reliably; a major outage or a downturn in fuel margins hits the stock hard, because there is no stable subscription-like revenue to cushion the blow.
Saved answer · last researched 8 Nov 2026
BIG PICTURE
Par Pacific makes 89% of its sales from refining crude oil
- 89% Refining crude oil into fuel
- 11% Retail stations and logistics
Par Pacific's four refineries, in Hawaii, Wyoming, Washington and Montana, bring in 89% of its sales. The gas stations people picture when they think of a fuel company make up just 7%, with logistics adding 4%. That split matters: the company lives or dies by the gap between what it pays for crude and what it gets for gasoline and diesel. Source: MoneyDJ, data from 2025
Timeline
A Bankrupt Oil Explorer Starts Over
Par Pacific came out of the 2012 restructuring of Delta Petroleum, an oil exploration company, and moved its headquarters to Houston. It had just one employee on the payroll and almost no real business left, so it bought a crude oil logistics and trading operation and built a whole new team from scratch. The plan was simple to say and hard to do: buy the pieces of an energy and infrastructure business, not wildcat wells.
Delta Petroleum Becomes Par Petroleum
That same year, the old company officially came out of bankruptcy and got a new name, Par Petroleum, a sign it was starting fresh rather than trying to revive the past.
Buying Hawaii's Biggest Refinery
The new company's first big swing was to buy a large refinery in Kapolei, Hawaii, from Tesoro for close to $400 million — the biggest refinery in the state, turning crude into diesel, gasoline and marine fuel, with jet fuel going to nearby military bases and airlines. This was the first real proof of the strategy: own energy assets in remote places where few competitors can reach.
Par Petroleum Becomes Par Pacific Holdings
Two years later the company renamed itself Par Pacific Holdings to better reflect its plan of building and buying market-leading businesses, though its stock ticker stayed the same.
A New CEO and a Tax Asset
In 2015 the board brought in Bill Pate as President and CEO, replacing Joseph Israel, and Pate made clear he wanted to keep growing by acquiring energy and infrastructure businesses. He had a powerful tool on his side: roughly $1.4 billion of past tax losses the company could use to shield future profits, which made buying profitable businesses cheaper for Par than for most buyers.
A Wyoming Refinery and an Air Force Base
The next year Par bought a small refinery in Wyoming that pipes jet fuel to Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. It was the same playbook again: refineries in out-of-the-way markets where customers have few other places to turn.
Par Pacific Reaches the Fortune 1000
Then came a breakout year. In 2017 the company posted its best results ever, with adjusted earnings per share more than four times its previous high, which put it on the Fortune 1000 list for the first time. It also grew its book value by more than 20 percent while paying down debt — a rare combination of growth and cleanup.
Par Pacific Buys a Second Hawaii Refinery
Late the next year Par spent $45 million to buy another refinery in Kapolei, right next door to its first one, from Island Energy Services. The deal let it add 20 employees and take on 65 workers from the seller, tightening its grip on Hawaii's fuel supply.
Will Monteleone Takes Over as CEO
In 2024 the company handed the top job to Will Monteleone, who became CEO and President while Bill Pate stayed on the board. It was a quiet changing of the guard at the top of a company that had spent a decade buying and building.
The Hawaii Biorefinery Starts Up
The biggest bet of all was a renewable fuels plant built at the Kapolei refinery, which started running in 2026 with the ability to make renewable diesel, sustainable aviation fuel and other low-carbon products. For a while it looked like a money pit, but in the third quarter of that year it finally turned a profit, a payoff on a long and patient gamble.