August 31, 2016:

The BP Whiting Refinery has secured company approval to build another hydrotreater, a massive project likely to boost the Region’s economy.  BP Whiting Refinery plant manager Don Porter told the Lakeshore Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday at Dynasty Banquets in Hammond the oil company is now doing the engineering for a project that would result in hundreds of construction jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. Construction would begin next year and continue for a few years.  The new hydrotreater would help the BP Whiting Refinery meet a new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency mandate to ensure that gasoline has less than 10 parts per million of sulfur, instead of the current standard of 30 parts per million.  BP in December 2013 finished work on a multiyear, $4.2 billion modernization project at the refinery that was widely credited with propping up Northwest Indiana’s economy during the Great Recession.  “Virtually every industrial market in the Midwest was struggling,” Construction Advancement Foundation Executive Director Dewey Pearman said. “This was the one market that got through that period.” 

As many as 14,000 union tradesmen worked on the project, filling local hotel rooms.  “It really helped hotels,” said Chris Cash, general manager of the Ramada by the Indiana Toll Road in Hammond. “All our employees are local and most live in Hammond. We’d appreciate it if you (BP) did more.”  The modernization project, which already included a new hydrotreater, also meant a windfall of property tax revenue for Whiting, Hammond and East Chicago. E.C. Mayor Anthony Copeland estimates it increased the city’s assessed valuation by $500 million.  “It’s going to mean millions of dollars in ensuring years,” he said. “It’s coming down at a moment it’s needed.”

BP has invested $90 billion in the United States over the last decade, and generated $135 billion in economic activity in the U.S. in 2014. That included $21 billion paid to 7,500 vendors. BP converted the Whiting Refinery, its biggest and the largest inland refinery in the United States, to refine more heavy crude oil because it’s about $15 a barrel cheaper to purchase, making the refinery more profitable.  The number of refineries in the United States has shrunk from around 350 to about 130 nationally, so the remaining ones are bigger and more competitive, Porter said.  The new hydrotreater is one of several projects underway at the former Standard Oil Refinery on the shore of Lake Michigan. BP for instance is building a new fire suppression building in Hammond and recently installed a new dissolved nitrogen flotation unit in its wastewater treatment plant to remove dissolved organics in the wastewater.  The new equipment initially malfunctioned, discharging five times the permitted limit of total suspended solids of industrial waste into Lake Michigan.  “We had difficulty starting that up, and I want to apologize,” Porter said. “That’s not what we strive to do, but we got that straightened out. Now it operates very well, more efficiently than before.”

By nwi.com