Flint Hills breaks ground on Texas refinery expansion
Flint Hills Resources, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., has started construction on a project designed to increase processing capabilities for US crude oil at its 230,000-b/d West refinery at Corpus Christi, Tex. (OGJ Online, Aug. 27, 2012).
At a cost of about $600 million, the West refinery expansion, named Project Eagle Ford (PEF), received final internal board approval in September and currently is scheduled to be completed in 36 months, Koch said.
In addition to equipping the refinery with an ability to process 100% US light US crude from nearby Eagle Ford shale play, PEF also will aid the Corpus Christi plant’s efforts to reduce criteria air emissions through the inclusion of best available control technologies, said Valerie Pompa, vice-president of Flint Hills Resources Corpus Christi LLC.
The US Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality issued requisite permits for the project in May following an accord Flint Hills reached with environmental groups in late-2013 to implement additional emissions-reduction measures and more-stringent monitoring at the West refinery (OGJ Online, May 29, 2014; OGJ Online, Dec. 12, 2013).
Formerly named the Domestic Crude Project, PEF involves the modification of equipment at the refinery’s continuous catalytic regeneration hot oil heater as well as the inclusion of a new saturates gas plant and associated hot oil heater.
PEF also will include installation of a mid-plant cooling tower, equipment piping, process vessels, and two storage tanks at the site.
Once completed, PEF will boost the West refinery’s crude oil processing capacity by about 7%.
