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Halcon plans $70 million fuel depot for Lordstown
LORDSTOWN
A subsidiary of Houston-based Halcon Resources Corp. has plans to construct a $70 million fuel depot at the Ohio Commerce Center to store and distribute oil produced across the Utica Shale play to both the East Coast and Gulf Coast.
The facility was approved during a meeting of the Village’s Board of Zoning Appeals earlier this month. Construction is expected to create 50 jobs for one year, and 30 full-time jobs will be required to staff the depot.
Once completed, the project will include four bays for trucks, a 20-rail-car loading platform, three condensate stabilizers, which capture condensate that would otherwise burn off into the environment, and six storage tanks each capable of holding up to 90,000 barrels of crude or other products from the Utica. Construction will come in three phases, with the first expected to be complete in 2014.
The facility will be manned around the clock, year-round, according to the company, and access to the site will be controlled and monitored by surveillance.
Halcon Resources Corp. and its subsidiary, Halcon Field Services, are aiming to get better prices and enhanced refining capabilities on the East Coast and the Gulf Coast. Combined with other processing facilities, storage depots and pipelines currently in operation or planned for the region, Halcon’s new facility will aid operators across the Utica in getting their product to market — currently considered a major impediment to further drilling and development across the play.
The commerce center sits on a 480-acre mixed-use industrial site that already houses warehouses and distribution operations for several companies. Earlier this year, Savage Services, a materials handling and management company, started work at the site to import and distribute frack sand, which is used to hold open the small cracks made in shale rock that allow oil and gas to travel to the surface.
The site recently received a $2 million Ohio Job Ready Sites grant to renovate and add rail and roads there.
“There are no existing midstream facilities in the district that can perform the proposed uses on a comparable scale,” Halcon said in a statement.
Halcon has been active in Western Pennsylvania and Mahoning County. It also has four drilling permits in Trumbull County, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
The company said the commerce center is under-utilized and can accommodate additional traffic.