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This article examines the environmental history of the Abadan oil refinery in Iran’s southwest province of Khuzestan, 1912-1951. During this period the refinery was the centre of operations in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), now known as BP, and a crucial node for the supply of oil for the British empire. Reading the corporation’s own archive against the grain and drawing on the ‘bodily archive’ of former Iranian residents and workers, the article makes two main contributions. First, it shows how the refinery embodied the coloniality of the oil company in its transformation of local ecologies, creation of new racialised environments, and epistemic erasure. Second, the article offers insights into how the sacrifice zones of the Global North and South were connected and where they diverged in the making of the Anthropocene. Through the refinery, pollution followed a double standard of the oil industry : on the one hand, AIOC standardised refining processes in line with US refineries, and on the other, shared the same negligence of local environments as US oil companies. However, AIOC also went further to actively render toxicity invisible by casting ill health as endemic to local society. This helped maintain the coloniality of the refinery through the Iranian government’s nationalisation of oil in 1951, even as the oil company was expelled.