‘Gorilla’ revealed

Dallas company plans to build oil refinery
By Josh Verges

ELK POINT [South Dakota] - A Texas energy company looking to build what it calls an environmentally friendly oil refinery outed itself Wednesday as Union County’s “Gorilla” project.

….The project [by Hyperion Resources Inc. of Dallas] would refine 400,000 barrels of oil into low-sulfur gasoline and diesel fuel each day, enough to serve South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska, said Richard Benda, state tourism and development secretary.

The refinery would be the first built in the country since 1976 and comes at a time when politicians are looking to sever the marriage to Middle East oil….

Hyperion plans to pipe in crude oil from Canada, but how they’d do it is uncertain.

A Canadian firm, TransCanada, is planning a pipeline that would move 435,000 barrels of crude oil per day [to] South Dakota by 2009. Trans-Canada spokesman Jeff Rauh said Wednesday that the pipeline is not related to Hyperion, and the two companies have not met….

The refinery would be the “most environmentally sound energy center in the United States,” protecting air and water quality and producing ultra-low sulfur gasoline and diesel, the company said. Water used to cool the plant - reported by project planners to be 12 million gallons daily - would be returned to the Missouri River cleaner than it is extracted, Phillips said…. ([1] Full story, [2] more stories on the same subject)

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Note by folc.ca:
No one in that or in any of the related articles mentioned what will be done with the waste sulphur the new refinery will produce.  Exports of sulphur by the US were 822,000 tonnes in 2004 and are forecasted to increase to 1.5 million tonnes in 2010, while exports of sulphur from Canada to the US were 2.1 million tonnes in 2006 and are forecasted to decrease to 400,000 tonnes in 2020.  The impact of the new refinery on those import and export figures is not reflected in the numbers. (More detailed [3] waste-sulphur market figures — 1.7 MB PPT file)
A barrel of oil has a volume of 159 litres.  The prohibition on storing waste sulphur in blocks in the US dictates that Canadian synthetic crude oil must be shipped after having been desulphurized.  That means that for every barrel of synthetic crude oil shipped to the US roughly 7.95 litres or 16.7 kg of sulphur will be produced and require disposal in Canada.
The shipment of an additional 400,000 bpd to South Dakota will cause 6,678 tonnes of sulphur to be produced in Canada, with the requirement to either sell that daily volume of sulphur into the saturated world market (a clear impossibility) or to store that much additional sulphur each day.  The only other alternative would be to stop the production of synthetic crude oil.  Quite clearly, that won’t happen.