An artist’s rendering of the array.
Flint Hills Resources has announced it will build its second company-owned solar facility to power its U.S. refinery operations. The new solar facility will provide electricity to the company’s Corpus Christi West refinery, which produces jet fuel, ultra-low sulfur diesel and gasoline, in addition to the chemical building blocks used in thousands of everyday products.
The project is believed to be the second-largest utility-scale solar complex in the Corpus Christi area and the first solar project in Texas to deliver on-site self-generated electricity directly to an oil refinery. Under optimal conditions, the solar power plant is expected to supply almost a third of the refinery’s power needs.
“We continue to improve our refinery operations and make progress toward our vision of being the best refining company in the industry,” said Jeff Ramsey, president and CEO of Flint Hills Resources. “We prove that large-scale solar energy can be successfully integrated into large, complex industrial facilities, reducing costs while maintaining reliability and improving our environmental performance.”
When completed, the 27 MW solar project will be located on approximately 100 acres of industrial land across the street from the western refinery complex on Interstate Highway 37 in Corpus Christi, Texas.
The array is expected to have a peak capacity of approximately 28% of the refinery’s power needs. The estimated costs
of this project amounts to $53 million. DEPCOM Power, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, has been selected as the engineering, procurement and construction contractor for the project. Both Flint Hills Resources and DEPCOM are subsidiaries of Koch Companies.
“This is an unusual project and an exciting opportunity to integrate solar energy directly into a large refinery complex, reliably and at a lower cost than conventional retail energy,” said John Schroeder, DEPCOM’s executive VP for distributed energy. “It’s not often you see utility-scale projects for a single facility and while this may be one of the first projects of its kind on this scale in Texas, it won’t be the last. Distributed solar energy is proving to be a competitive and reliable energy source for many energy-intensive industries.”
The Flint Hills Resources Corpus Christi solar facility will be the second source of on-site power generation for the refinery. The refinery also operates a combined heat and power (CHP) system, which supplies approximately 30 MW of electricity. The cogeneration of electricity and steam by the CHP is more efficient than producing them separately, and on-site electricity generation avoids the energy losses associated with long-distance transmission, transformation
and utility distribution. At peak capacity, CHP and solar together could meet up to 60% of the Corpus Christi West refinery’s daily power needs. The solar project also improves energy efficiency by locating generation closer to where the power is consumed, preventing line loss.
News item from DEPCOM