YUMA, ARIZ. — Hyperion Refining watchers might be interested to know that the oil refinery/energy center the Texas company is planning for Union County may not be the first from-scratch refinery to be built in the United States in more than 30 years, as is oft recited.

 

Arizona Clean Fuels CEO Glenn McGinnis said Friday that his company is filling in some specifics and wrapping up negotiations with “several investors” to build a refinery near Yuma, Ariz. That project could break ground as soon as late next year, McGinnis said.

 

On Aug. 20, when Hyperion was granted its preconstruction air quality permit by the state of South Dakota, Hyperion Vice President Preston Phillips said construction would get underway in 2011. That likely would not be in January, due not only to the massive amount of earth-moving involved and the snow and frozen condition of the soil that time of year, but to the reality that no project that big moves as fast as the developers would like it to. Remember, Hyperion once predicted it would have its main air quality permit by September 2008.

 

Arizona Clean Fuels’ $3.5 billion refinery would process only 150,000 barrels-per-day, of sweet crude from Mexico, compared to Hyperion’s 400,000-barrel daily order of Canadian tar sands crude. But Clean Fuels said as recently as a year ago that it hoped to break ground in early 2009. It took the company a long four years to get its air quality permit. So, as they say, it ain’t over yet.

 

And, Arizona Clean Fuels started working on its refinery project in 1999. Hyperion began, publicly at least, in 2007. John Kerekex, spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, a year ago called the Yuma refinery project “the poster child for why you can’t build one in this country.” And, he noted, Clean Fuels is in an area where the people want the refinery.

 

 The Yuma project’s initial site, it turned out, was a just a small fraction of a thousands-of-acres tract that got tied up in court when an Indian tribe sued the federal government over a land transfer deal with a drainage district. The tribe eventually lost its case, but the Arizona Clean Fuels didn’t wait around. It found a new location just outside the contested land’s border and kept working.

 

Since air quality permits are very site-specific, Clean Fuels had to reapply for its permit. McGinnis the permit is currently in the process of being re-issued by the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality.

 

“Field work would not begin before the end of next year,” McGinnis said Friday. “Our expectation is to have it completed in 2013.”

 

The most recent completion date put out by Hyperion? 2015.

 

It’s not a race, and almost certainly both project are cheering for one another. But it will be interesting to see if either company gets there on its current timetable.

  

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