Plant breaks ground

FORT STOCKTON For a community that recently has lost about 800 oil and gas drilling jobs, the Century Plant is a $1.2 billion treatment.

The plant, located in Pecos County some 30 miles south of Fort Stockton off Highway 285, will bring in 500 construction workers for two years, Fort Stockton economic development director Doug May said.

"It's huge," May said on Wednesday before a groundbreaking ceremony. "We challenge anybody in Texas to find a groundbreaking for a billion-two. This is going to go a long way to offset the drilling jobs we've lost."

SandRidge Energy is building the plant to extract carbon dioxide from natural gas it drills in the Piñon field. From its perspective, carbon dioxide is a "waste gas," said SandRidge chief executive officer Tom Ward.

SandRidge then will sell the remaining methane gas.

When the plant is completed, it will be turned over to Occidental Petroleum, which will use the carbon dioxide in enhanced oil recovery in the Permian Basin. Oxy will operate the plant and treat the gas under a 30-year contract.

The plant, which already has started dirt work, will go online in two segments, May said. The first is expected to be completed in mid-2010 and the rest in the first quarter of 2011. It will add between 40 and 50 permanent jobs.

William Albrecht, president of Oxy Oil and Gas, on Wednesday said the plant will help the company produce 50,000 additional barrels of oil per day within five years.

"For us, it was sort of a match made in heaven," he said. "SandRidge had a problem of needing to do something with CO2. Once we met SandRidge, our problems sort of went away."

Tom Ward, SandRidge chief executive officer, said Oxy was the perfect partner.

"For as large a project as this, there was only one company that could take on so much," he said.

Albrecht said carbon dioxide recovery also would allow Oxy to produce oil much cheaper.

And May said the plant also would have a positive effect on the environment.

"All the gas that used to go into the atmosphere is being sequestered (into the ground)," he said.

And while the wind farms and solar projects planned for the area will bring in workers for a short time and only leave a few permanent employees, Fort Stockton Mayor Ruben Falcon said SandRidge will have to drill in the area to meet contractual requirements for supplying the plant. That will be good news for a county that just saw its unemployment rate increase from 5.3 percent to 7.6 percent in a month.

Falcon said the plant has had 1,100 applications for the 500 available positions.

"When this is done, it's going to require a lot of jobs," he said. "That's paychecks in people's pockets and people getting back to work."