Limetree Bay advances restart of St. Croix refinery, mooring assets
Limetree Bay Ventures LLC, a joint venture of ArcLight Capital Partners LLC and Freepoint Commodities LLC, is bringing its new single-point mooring (SPM) buoy into service in October and will proceed by yearend with the long-planned restart of the idled and former Hovensa LLC 500,000-b/d refinery at Limetree Bay on St. Croix, USVI (OGJ Online, July 10, 2018; Jan. 8, 2016).
Upon completing its ongoing refinery restart project—which has involved investments to revitalize the facility as an environmentally compliant, multipurpose energy center to conduct large-scale refining operations and provide third-party storage service for crude oil and refined petroleum products—Limetree Bay will initially be able to process about 200,000 b/d of feedstock, the operator said.
Alongside the restart announcement, Limetree Bay said it also has promoted Brian Lever to president and chief executive officer of the company from his most recent role of overseeing the refinery restart planning, organizational development, and precommissioning efforts.
Under the new organizational structure, Robert Weldzius, senior vice-president of refining, will continue to provide day-to-day oversight for the refinery.
To lead the marine terminal business and operations, Limetree Bay has recently hired Jeffrey Hersperger as senior-vice president of terminals.
“Limetree is focused on recruiting the strongest refinery and terminal operations team in the industry,” said Lever. “Our management additions over the last year are a testimony to the compelling nature of our business plan as we complete the SPM buoy and refinery restart projects.”
Operations overview
Confirmation of the restart follows Limetree Bay Refining LLC’s November 2018 announcement that it entered into definitive agreements with BP PLC’s supply and trading arm for tolling, supply, and product offtake of the refinery beginning in late 2019 (OGJ Online, Nov. 5, 2018). Under the agreement, BP will supply the refinery with feedstocks and market a major portion of the product offtake volumes, including low-sulfur fuels that will meet International Maritime Organization (IMO) mandates in 2020, Limetree Bay said.
Key restart work at the site began in 2018, including the 62,000-b/d delayed coker unit, extensive desulfurization capacity, and a reformer unit to produce clean, low-sulfur transportation fuels conforming to IMO 2020 standards.
The refinery is well-situated to process the growing supply of light sweet crude from the US Gulf Coast and supply product into growing end markets in the Caribbean, South America, and Africa, according to the operator’s website.
Limetree Bay Terminals LLC also operates assets at the St. Croix complex to enable storage, segregation, blending, and global movement of crude oils, fuel oils, bunker, gasolines, diesel, jet fuel, and LPGs. Customers include integrated global oil majors, refiners, global trading houses, and the co-located refinery. The terminal consists of 167 storage tanks with a capacity of about 34 million bbl, as well as deepwater access to 11 docks including the offshore SPM buoy, which is capable of loading and discharging vessels up to very large crude carrier size.
Contact Robert Brelsford at [email protected].
Robert Brelsford | Downstream Editor
Robert Brelsford joined Oil & Gas Journal in October 2013 as downstream technology editor after 8 years as a crude oil price and news reporter on spot crude transactions at the US Gulf Coast, West Coast, Canadian, and Latin American markets. He holds a BA (2000) in English from Rice University and an MS (2003) in education and social policy from Northwestern University.
