Pine Bend Refinery
The Pine Bend Refinery is the largest oil refinery in Minnesota, located in the Twin Cities suburbs of Rosemount and Inver Grove Heights next to southern split of U.S. Highway 52 and Minnesota State Highway 55. The refinery is notable for being the largest in the United States to be located in a state without any oil wells. Overall, it ranked 14th in the country as of 2012 by production, with a nameplate capacity of 320,000 barrels (51,000 m3) per day. The facility is owned by Flint Hills Resources (FHR), a subsidiary of Koch Industries.
The plant was first constructed in 1955 by the Great Northern Oil Company with a capacity of 25,000 barrels per day. Koch Industries purchased a controlling interest in the plant in 1969. Since then, capacity has grown more than tenfold.
As of 2001, Minnesotans were using a total of 7.2 million US gallons (27,000 m3) of gasoline per day, and fuel use continues to climb in the region by about 2% annually. About 70% of the gasoline fuel used in the state comes from Pine Bend and the nearby St. Paul Park Refinery, while most of the rest comes from the Mandan Refinery in North Dakota, and the Superior Refinery in Superior, Wisconsin. Only 40 to 50% of Pine Bend's output is used within the state.
In 2006 the plant underwent a "$350 million project to produce a diesel fuel containing substantially less sulfur."
In 2012 the company proposed to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) a $400 million upgrade to help move the refinery "closer to its processing capacity of 320,000 barrels of crude per day and also reduce emissions of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide". It was estimated that the refinery was responsible for 2% of Minnesota's total greenhouse-gas emissions, about 3.5 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. The expansion is also expected to increase the "average daily contract workforce to more than 1,000 workers". If approved by the EPA, the upgrade is set to begin in 2014, and include the replacement of the plant's three less-efficient heaters with two state-of-the-art model heaters, upgrades to an existing process heater, as well as improvements to the cooling towers.
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