Siting permit approved for DKRW plant
By Aaron LeClair
Boomerang Staff Writer
laramieboomerang.com
The Industrial Siting Council granted an industrial siting permit to an international energy corporation that plans to construct a coal-to-liquid plant near Elk Mountain in Carbon County.
At a hearing Thursday in the Platte Valley Community Center in Saratoga, the concil voted 4-1 to grant DKRW Energy an industrial siting permit for the construction and operation of a $2 billion coal-to-liquid plant that will be owned and operated as Medicine Bow Fuel & Power LLC.
After the meeting, Kate Perez, director of communications and public relations for DKRW Advanced Fuels, said the industrial siting permit was just one of 40 environmental permits that DKRW must meet to construct the plant.
“We have the air permits under consideration, we’ve got emissions (permits) and … there’s some things with the Bureau of Land Management,” she said.
However, Perez said obtaining the industrial siting permit from the council was a major step forward in making the coal-to-liquid plant a reality.
“This is a really big one for us, and we feel really good,” she said. “We feel really good about what they did.”
DKRW plans to place the Medicine Bow Fuel & Power plant about 13 miles southwest of Medicine Bow and eight miles north of Elk Mountain, where Arch Coal Inc. owns both an underground and surface mine with a total reserve of 180 million tons of coal.
Construction of the plant was originally scheduled to begin by the third quarter of 2008. That has been pushed back to the second quarter of 2009, Jude Rolfes, DKRW vice president of engineering, construction and asset management, said.
DKRW estimates that it will hire up to 2,300 skilled and unskilled workers at the peak of the construction period in 2011-2012.
The plant then will require up to 450 permanent workers to run both the coal-to-liquid plant and the coal mines.
Rolfes said they would access the Wyoming Department of Labor to search for workers from the surrounding communities of Hanna, Elk Mountain, Saratoga, Medicine Bow, Rawlins and Laramie.
DKRW will construct temporary housing for up to 500 workers at the work site. Rolfes said they are also looking at constructing temporary housing in Medicine Bow.
When DKRW hosted the last of its community meetings in July in Laramie, the company’s chief operations officer had said the plant would produce ultra-low sulfur diesel from coal.
But at Thursday’s hearing, DKRW announced that it had abandoned that plan and said the plant will instead produce ultra-low sulfur gasoline.
Rolfes said the choice to forego diesel was made because the technology for it would not be ready by the time construction begins on the plant.
The technology to turn coal into ultra-low sulfur gasoline, meanwhile, has been around for about 20 years, Rolfes said.
In addition to producing gasoline, the liquification of the coal will create carbon dioxide, sulfur, steam and water, naphtha, slag and other chemicals.
Rolfes said MBFP would trap the carbon dioxide and sell it to companies in the enhanced oil recovery business. The slag would be used for road maintainance.
The remaining byproducts of the liquification process will be fed back into the system to power the plant. Rolfes said plant would be a “closed-loop” system in which they would recycle as much of the byproducts as they could.
“We recycle every drop of water we possibly can,” Rolfes said.
Rolfes said the MBFP plant would greately benefit the local economies through increases in ad valorum, severance and property taxes.
The plant also would allow for educational, training, internship and research and development opportunities in conjunction with the University of Wyoming.
Aaron LeClair’s e-mail is copyedit3@laramieboomerang.com |
