Badlands advances proposed North Dakota processing plant

Continental Resources Inc., Oklahoma City, has entered a deal with Badlands NGLs LLC, Denver, for the long-term supply of ethane to Badlands’ proposed polyethylene (PE) production plant to be built in North Dakota.

Badlands, which announced the deal on Sept. 25, disclosed neither a value of the contract nor the contractual volume of ethane that Continental has committed to supply from its production operations in North Dakota’s Williston basin.

Details regarding the duration of the supply contract also remained unavailable.

Badlands did confirm, however, that it has decided to expand the nameplate production capacity of the PE plant to a proposed 2 million tonnes/year from its originally planned 1.53 million-tpy capacity as a result of ongoing discussion with North Dakota and Western Canadian NGL-sourced ethane feedstock suppliers.

William Jeffry Gilliam, Badlands’ chief executive officer, said the company has signed licensing agreements with key technology partners over the last several weeks, but a precise timeline for the project’s completion has yet to be revealed.

First announced last year, the PE plant is intended to process abundant supplies of ethane available from the Williston basin, Badlands said in an Oct. 13, 2014, release.

At the time, the company already had made agreements with two strategic partners for the plant’s development.

Spain’s Tecnicas Reunidas SA, Madrid, and Vinmar Projects LLC, a subsidiary of Vinmar International Ltd., Houston, were due to complete a preliminary engineering analysis for the proposed plant, which was to include technology evaluations as well as ethane-to-ethylene and ethylene-to-PE licensor selection, ethane aggregation engineering and planning, and final site selection, by yearend 2014, Badlands said.

Badlands also signed a mutually binding, product offtake memorandum of understanding with Vinmar, which agreed to take 100% of PE output produced by the proposed project for 15 years, the company said.

As of October 2014, the project required a capital investment of about $4 billion to complete, Badlands said.

Contact Robert Brelsford at [email protected].