DAKOTA DUNES — The Dakota Valley Business Council sent out a message Monday urging its members to voice their support for the $10 billion, 400,000-barrel-per-day when the state South Dakota Department Department of Environment and Natural Resources’ Board of Minerals and Enviornment holds public comment meetings Wednesday and Thursday in Elk Point, S.D.

The DVBC took that stand about a year ago and spoke in support of the project before the public hearings on rezoning the 3,292 acres for the project held by the county zoning board and board of county commissioners.

DVBC President Greg Miner said in a statement that the business council wants its members to voice support for the project and to ask the DENR “to objectively evalutate the Hyperion Air Quality Permit and act on it without delay.”

Following the two days of public comment in Elk Point and a tour of the proposed site about seven miles north of there, the BME will hold a trial-like contested case hearing on the air quality permit over two weeks, one each in May and June, in Pierre. There’s no telling how long the board will review the evidence and application before ruling on it.

Hyperion needs the permit before the project can proceed.

Refinery opponent Doug Maurstad said this week he’s taking a break from the fight.

“I’m burned out,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Been on this subject for over two years and I’m convinced it will never happen, and if it does, I can’t control it anyway.”

Maurstad said he regretted that his argument was reaching such a small audience, but remained philosophical. “This refinery is never going to happen,” he wrote, “and look how many lives are in turmoil because of it.”

He said the Journal should continue to ask where the oil is coming from – he doesn’t think the Alberta tar sands are a viable source; how refinery products will leave the refinery, and the literal money question – where is the $10 billion coming from.

For now,  Hyperion is sticking with the tar sands and has said it will both pipe and truck out finished products. As for financing, if any is in place the company is not revealing its source. The fact is, that none of those answers will matter if the company can’t get the pre-construction air quality permit it needs to move ahead on the project. It doesn’t make sense to pour more money into pipeline development or rights of way or preconstruction activity until that permit is locked in.

So, is Maurstad mistaking this lull — at least in what the public sees – as the project’s demise? Or is it the calm before the flurry of preparations to build?

DES MOINES — Ed Cable, leader of Save Union County’s campaign against Hyperion Refining’s proposed oil refinery — has waived his right to a hearing and given up his architect’s license in Iowa permanently after what the state claims is a failure to comply with the rules.

Cable signed a consent order on Dec. 12 in a disciplinary case brought against him by the Architectural Examining Board of the State of Iowa. The order follows a suspension of Cable’s license. In the order, the board reprimands Cable for practicing architecture with a suspended and lapsed registration and with violating a prior order imposing discipline. (more…)

YUMA, Ariz. — Arizona Clean Fuels appears to be on track to be the first company to build an oil refinery from scratch in 32 years. If it is successful, Hyperion Refining, the Texas company proposing to build a $10 billion, 400,000 barrel-per-day oil refinery in southern Union County, S. D., would have to let go of its own aspiration to be the first.

“We’re very close to finishing our financing,” Clean Fuels Vice president David Treanor, told me recently. “We hope to wrap things up in the next month then move forward with construction in the second quarter of `09.”

The project got started in 1999, so that would make it a 10-year journey from start to shovel in the the ground. Hyperion’s work, at least what the public is aware of, looking back, started sometime in 2006. (more…)

James Heisinger, chairman of both the Living River Group and South Dakota chapters of the Sierra Club, sent out a press release this morning commenting on a couple letters from federal agencies that found a number of shortcomings in Hyperion Refining’s draft air quality permit and the South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources’ handling of it. Its content is no surprise. A story detailing the lengthy (more…)

Environmentalists are cheering this week’s selection of Rep. Henry Waxman to chair the the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The California Democratic wrestled the post from its longtime Democratic leader, John Dingell, a long-time champion of auto makers in his home state of Michigan. Dingell also was regarded as closer to utilities, oil and gas producers.

Waxman, an ardent climate change campaigner, along with President-elect Barack Obama and other Democrats who control Congress by big margains could advance new environmental policies that would slow or even derail the proposed Hyperion Energy Center.

The proposed Union County refinery would process 400,000 barrels of crude per day from the rich oil sands fields of Alberta, Canada. As the Calgary Herald reported this week, “Oil sands foe wins U.S. energy chair,” Waxman has battled against expansion of oil sands development, “which has received bad publicity south of the border due to the energy-intensiveness of production and increasing greenhouse gas emissions.” (more…)

SIOUX CITY — City Councilman Aaron Rochester said today the city has a committee working to make sure the oil refinery/energy center Hyperion Refining is proposing to build near Elk Point, S.D., benefits Sioux City, if it comes to fruition.

In print and online today, Land near refinery site goes on sale, I reported on three tracts of mostly ag land in southeast Union County, totaling 675 acres, being put on the market for $71,874 per acre. The biggest selling point: the property’s close proximity to the site of the proposed Hyperion Energy Center.

The three tracts up for sale are owned by Paradigm Business Park LLC, a local investment group, looking to capitalize on energy-related support businesses that likely would sprout up if Hyperion eventually builds its $10 billion oil refinery and power plant on a 3,292-acre site just north of Elk Point.

Lloyd Companies, a Sioux Falls-based real estate firm, recently put up large signs on the highly-visible property, located at the intersection of Interstate 29 and South Dakota Highway 50.

To view the Lloyd Companies’ brochure of the parcels, open the attached pdf.

golden_land_near_hyperion.pdf

I wasn’t expecting to consider Langston Hughes or his famous poem, “Dream Deferred,”  when I went to the courthouse in Elk Point, S.D., this morning to cover a public hearing on the proposed make-over of the county’s zoning ordinance.

But that’s what happened.

(more…)

Today’s story about Hyperion Refining’s over estimating the emissions from its proposed IGCC – a gasification plant that would burn petroleum coke, a byproduct of oil refining, to produce electricity to power the refinery –  points to one reason the permitting process takes so long.  It’s complicated.

(more…)