Wednesday, June 4, 2008

South Dakotans Approve New Refinery For Canadian Crude Oil

Voters in a rural South Dakota county in the southeastern corner of the state approved in a Tuesday referendum a rezoning to construct an oil refinery that can process 400,000 barrels of Canadian tar sand oil piped in daily.

That's much larger than the size of the 235,000 barrel-per-day capacity of the proposed refinery expansion in Superior, at the Murphy Oil refinery.

The Superior refinery currently can process 35,000 barrels per day.

We'll see if the South Dakota plan, along with expansion at refineries near Detroit and Chicago, makes the Superior plan more, or less likely.

2 comments:

Dave1 said...

It seems to me that there is an analogy here with urban sprawl.

Building an large refinery like this in South Dakota will take a lot of infrastructure include new roads, housing , etc.

To me it makes more sense to expand existing refineries where the infrastructure and work forces are already concentrated.

Anonymous said...

It sounds like a new pipeline will be needed.

Expanding existing refineries like the one in Superior that are already connected to the existing pipeline would be a better approach.