Meridian Energy Group Inc., Irvine, Calif., has filed its application to the air quality division of North Dakota’s health department for a permit to proceed with construction of its planned 55,000-b/sd high-conversion Davis refinery to be built in the heart of southwestern North Dakota’s Bakken shale region, near Belfield, in Billings County, ND (OGJ Online, Dec. 23, 2015).
Confident in the refinery’s engineering and ability to comply with and exceed North Dakota's most stringent air-quality regulations, Meridian submitted the first application in history to seek permitting to construct a complex refinery under classification as a synthetic minor source (SMS) of air contaminants, Meridian said.
Meridian’s decision to apply for SMS instead of major-source permitting follows the company’s plan to outfit the refinery with the most advanced, best-available control technology (BACT) for detecting and controlling any fugitive emissions at the manufacturing site, according to the operators’s website.
With its application for construction permitting now filed, Meridian said it remains on schedule to have Phase 1 of the Davis refinery, including a 27,500-b/sd single crude unit as well as ancillary processing units, in operation no later than early 2018.
A second phase of development that will expand the refinery to its full 55,000-b/sd capacity is due for startup sometime in 2019 (OGJ Online, Mar. 23, 2016).
The company’s submission of its permit-to-construct application follows the Billings County Board of County Commissioners’ recent unanimous approval of Meridian’s zoning certificate and conditional-use permit for the Davis refinery (OGJ Online, July 7, 2016).
Meridian also rececently finalized a licensing agreement with Axens North America Inc. (Axens NA), division of Axens SA, Rueil-Malmaison, France, for implementation of Axens NA’s proprietary Clean-Tech refinery and hydrocarbon processing technology at the grassroots refinery (OGJ Online, Aug. 24, 2016).
Contact Robert Brelsford at [email protected].