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Regulatory hurdles still remain however

Voters in Elk Point, South Dakota, have approved the construction of the nation's first new gasoline refinery in 32 years. To be built by Hyperion Energy, the refinery will process 400,000 barrels a day of Canadian tar sands crude into low-sulfur diesel, gasoline, and jet fuel. Supporters say the plant, which will be the world's cleanest, will reduce dependence on Mideast oil, as well as help to lower gas prices.

The new refinery means billions of dollars of capital investment, along with thousands of high-paying jobs, and a tremendous economic boom to the tiny community. Even still, the battle to approve the refinery was a closely-fought one, with environmental groups spending tens of thousands of advertising dollars to persuade residents to vote against it. The final vote was 3,932 in favor, 2,832 against -- a massive turnout in this small town of 10,000 residents.

While oil prices are responsible for the majority of gasoline's increase, part of the problem is restricted refinery capacity. With the nation's gas being produced by an increasingly rickety network of aging refineries, a substantial percentage of U.S. demand is now refined overseas. Gasoline is more expensive to ship than oil, which raises prices and creates potential supply bottlenecks. A shortage of refinery capacity was also responsible for gasoline shortages after Hurricane Katrina struck, when the temporary closure of several refineries caused prices in some southern states to more than double.

Approval for the plant is not yet absolute, however, as legal action continues to bar construction from beginning. According to Ed Cable, the leader of one of the groups opposing construction, "We have strategies in place to slow or delay all the permit processes." The first such is a legal challenge to the county's zoning approval, filed in state court.

Hyperion must also win the approval of state and federal regulators, a process that requires over 1,000 separate permit applications and is expected to take several years.

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Do it
By Scorpion on 6/4/2008 12:46:00 PM , Rating: 5
I'm all for weening off of oil and developing alternative energies, but I'm for this. It will boost SDs economy. It sits in a void in geographic refinery locations. And a new refinery will give refreshing experience to the industry which hasn't done this in 37 years. This will help the knowledge at existing refineries. It's in a more secure geographic location. If anything were to happen to an existing one, then it's not so bad to have a new one around. I don't think we need to start building new refineries everywhere though.

We still need to focus most of our energy towards alternate fuel discovery and deployment.




RE: Do it
By FITCamaro on 6/4/2008 1:03:05 PM , Rating: 5
We need more than one new refinery. We shouldn't be importing refined fuel at all. We used to do nearly all the world's refining. But since we can't build new refineries, thats changed. We should be importing crude and using it at home. Better yet, lets tap our own oil so we don't have to import it.

I say start the building. 5-10-15 refineries. However many we need to not be constrained by our refining capacity. Also start building nuclear plants. So we need less to begin with. Oh wait those kill the environment to if they explode(human casualties aren't important to hardcore environmentalists).


RE: Do it
By smitty3268 on 6/4/08, Rating: -1
RE: Do it
By masher2 (blog) on 6/4/2008 1:35:50 PM , Rating: 5
> " Just because there a few crazy nutjob environmentalists doesn't mean anything"

The people espousing those positions aren't just a few at the fringe; they're those leading major environmental groups and those widely respected by the environmental community.

If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.
-- Prince Phillip, speaking for the World Wildlife Fund

The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States
-- Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund.

We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion -- guilt-free at last!
-- Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalogue.

Capitalism is destroying the earth
-- Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists

Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental
-- David Foreman, founder Earth First!

If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy
-- Amory Lovins


RE: Do it
By Lerianis on 6/4/2008 1:40:39 PM , Rating: 5
Unfortunately, you are right. A lot of the so-called 'environmentalists' in this world are nothing more than sociopaths and eugenists in disguise.


RE: Do it
By Pirks on 6/4/2008 3:19:44 PM , Rating: 2
Wow, masher, just wow... I'm printing this right now to hang it on my office wall, this is the best thing I ever read on DT, no kidding

One question though - who is Amory Lovins?


RE: Do it
By masher2 (blog) on 6/4/2008 3:39:08 PM , Rating: 2
Founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental advocacy group.


RE: Do it
By lj535i on 6/5/2008 5:23:29 PM , Rating: 2
I would propose that this description of RMI is substantially off the mark, but before trying to put it in my own words, I'd suggest reviewing:
Core Principles...
http://rmi.org/sitepages/pid60.php
Mission Statement...
http://rmi.org/sitepages/pid55.php

Now for my own words, I think "environmental advocacy" implies a less balanced approach than I think RMI has striven for over the years.


RE: Do it
By Mystery Meat on 6/4/2008 5:05:49 PM , Rating: 5
More great environmentalist quotes:

The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.
—Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth” concept (as quoted by William Tucker in Progress and Privilege, 1982)

We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects…. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.
—David Foreman, Earth First!

Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed.
—Pentti Linkola

The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species (man) upon the rest of the natural world.
—John Shuttleworth

What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.
—Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-Colorado)

I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.
—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.
—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing....This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.
—Economist editorial

We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight.
—David Foreman, Earth First!

Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.
—Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!

If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS
—Earth First! Newsletter

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets…Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.
—David Graber, biologist, National Park Service

The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.
—Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project

Cannibalism is a “radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.”
—Lyall Watson, The Financial Times, 15 July 1995

Poverty For “Those People”
We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels.
—Carl Amery

Every time you turn on an electric light, you are making another brainless baby.
—Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists

To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.
—Lamont Cole

If there is going to be electricity, I would like it to be decentralized, small, solar-powered.
—Gar Smith, editor of the Earth Island Institute’s online magazine The Edge

The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.
—Reid Bryson, “Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man”, (1971)

The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer.
—Paul Ehrlich, in The Population Bomb (1968)

I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.
—Paul Ehrlich in (1969)

In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.
—Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)

Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity…in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.
—Paul Ehrlich in (1976)

This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.
—Peter Gwynne, Newsweek 1976

There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production—with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon… The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are hard-pressed to keep up with it.
—Newsweek, April 28, (1975)

This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000.
—Lowell Ponte in “The Cooling”, 1976

If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. … This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.
—Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)


RE: Do it
By FITCamaro on 6/4/2008 5:48:13 PM , Rating: 2
Classic. At least one guy will admit the truth about global warming. That if its a fraud that they should pursue it anyway because thats whats best for us.

And I love how the pre-70s quotes say it was the cooling that was going to kill us.


RE: Do it
By shockf1 on 6/6/2008 8:05:16 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
And I love how the pre-70s quotes say it was the cooling that was going to kill us.


well you know that the first theory is usually the correct one!!


RE: Do it
By FoxFour on 6/4/2008 10:06:18 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.
—Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-Colorado)


This is a very wise remark, and should not be lumped in with the rest of those quotes.

Energy conservation is inherently a smart idea. The implementation is where we tend to err.


RE: Do it
By masher2 (blog) on 6/4/2008 11:19:31 PM , Rating: 4
"Riding" one issue to accomplish a wholly different goal is inherently dishonest, and is never a "smart idea".


RE: Do it
By Bruneauinfo on 6/4/2008 10:31:40 PM , Rating: 2
everyone should die... kill each other, and yeah...

so who wants to publish my book?


RE: Do it
By lj535i on 6/5/08, Rating: -1
RE: Do it
By Cheapshot on 6/5/2008 1:05:09 PM , Rating: 1
If we were to take every individual living on earth and gave them a 3 foot by 3 foot area to stand in - the entire population would fit into an area approximately 22 square miles.


RE: Do it
By joex444 on 6/5/2008 7:13:53 PM , Rating: 2
OK, I can't resist. I'm calling bullshit.

Figure 6 billion = 6x10^9 people, and I'm being conservative here.

Now, give them all 9 sq ft. You therefore have 54x10^9 sq ft. Also, use the fact 1 mi = 5280 ft. Then 1 sq mi = 5280^2 ft^2. So, let's divide. 54x10^8 / (5280^2) = 1936 sq miles.

Interestingly, the state of Delaware has 1954 sq miles.


RE: Do it
By JonnyDough on 6/5/08, Rating: -1