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Originally Posted by ScoPro
Halliburton is not an oil drilling company.
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Correct. It's an oil service company. It builds the rigs, platforms, wells, stem pipelines, main pipelines and maintains and services them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DRob4JC
Not allowed to build refineries.
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They can build refineries if they want to, but there's no point in it.
The going rate right now is probably $2.5 - $3.0 Billion, and it'll take about 15-20 years (average 17 years).
The process is costly and complicated.
You would select a project manager who would form a team. The first thing they would do is prepare bid specs for site location. You'd have a 6 month closing period and then review all of the bidders' offers then select a company to find locations for you. That would take about a year.
Then you'd get your reports on about a dozen sites and your team would review them and select maybe the 6 best sites. When that's done, you're now 2 years into the project.
The you'd prepare bid specs to contract an environmental consultant to prepare environmental impact studies on the 6 locations you selected and when you get those reports you weed through them and select a primary site and an alternate site. Now you're about 4 years into the project.
After selecting your primary and two alternate sites, you'll have to post copies of the environmental impact studies for people to review. Normally you give a copy to the city council(s), county commissioners, put one at one or more public libraries and maybe in rural counties at high schools. The closing period for review and comment is typically a year, but in some places it could be 2 years. So now you're 5 years into the project and you don't even have a location yet.
So you're 1 year period for review and comment is up, and this is where the fun starts. You'll go to a meeting of the city council(s) or county commissioners and Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, NIMBY groups and other environmental groups will show up to contest your environmental impact study and they could file a lawsuit which will delay things (that's why having alternate sites works sometimes as long as they don't get bogged down in law suits).
Typically, the cities or counties involved will want to do their own environmental impact study, plus a traffic and economic study, so there's the bid spec/review/contracting process again. So now with negotiations with the municipalities and count(ies) involved and everything, you're 7 years into the project and you still don't have a location.
If everything is peachy, you have a temporary location and you can now apply to the pseudo-federal EPA for permits to build your refinery. This is a 3-year process because the EPA will do its own studies.
So 10 years into the project you finally get EPA approval and you can start building. It'll take 4-7 years depending on the size of the refinery (by capacity) and building the pipeline to connect to it etc (and the pipeline would have been included in the original and subsequent environmental impact studies).
Provided you don't get sued, you'll probably complete it on time about 15 to 17 years after you started.
You don't have any leadership at all in the White House or Congress, is the country going to electric cars? Natural gas powered cars? Are you staying with the gasoline combustion engine? What about the stupid ethanol thing? Oh yeah, I forgot about that. You can't build ethanol pipelines. You'll have to truck the ethanol in and that may require widening the roads and refurbishing bridges to handle heavier weights and Hazmat nonsense and what not. The cities and county will want you to pay for that, and pay for all the necessary traffic signals as well, plus any other conditions like sewage and water lines.
It would be best to select a site where you can build an ethanol plant adjacent to the refinery, assuming the refinery's main product will be gasoline (not all refineries produce gasoline -- in fact out of the 47 operating refineries in the US only 17 produce gasoline -- the rest produce your exorbitant extravagant life-style and standard of living).
Getting the capital to build a refinery won't be easy, especially without any leadership coming from the White House or Congress. Investors aren't going to be too keen on investing and banks not happy about loaning money to build a refinery that might not even refine a single barrel of oil.
8 years into the project, Congress might decide everyone is switching to natural gas powered cars or something. Who knows? That kind of uncertainty is bad for investment.
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