Plans for Nacero’s natural gas to gasoline plant near Penwell are proceeding with an air quality permit in hand, financing and a groundbreaking in the works.
Nacero Director of Project Integration Wesley Burnett gave an update on the project, the number of jobs it will create and the billions it will infuse into the regional economy.
Burnett spoke at a Discover Odessa meeting at the Holiday Inn on 42nd Street Thursday.
“We are real. We are moving. We are going to be doing this in Penwell and Odessa and it’s coming. You should see some dirt turning, as far as activity out on the site in the next several months, so we’re looking forward to that,” Burnett said.
The initial site near Penwell was 600 acres, but Nacero wanted 2,000 more acres so the whole area will encompass about 2,600 acres. This is also the site of Future Gen and Summit Power Group, neither of which materialized.
Burnett said the estimated cost for the total build-out of the project is about $8 billion.
There are C02 pipelines north of the site, Union Pacific Railroad and Interstate 20 also are out there, Burnett said.
Nacero is developing large-scale facilities that will make affordable, low and net zero carbon footprint gasoline from natural gas and renewable natural gas for today’s cars and trucks, Burnett said.
The plant will also have about 2,000 acres of solar to power the plant, Burnett said.
“We’re going to be powered totally from renewable energy — solar and wind. That’s going to be a big part of our facility out there,” Burnett said.
“This is going to be something that’s going to be usable in your gas-powered vehicles today,” he said.
Renewable natural gas comes from feedlots, landfills, flare gas.
Burnett said this is proven technology currently being used in Turkmenistan.
“Commercially, this is a proven technology; it works. They are making gasoline. We can say we know it’s going to work,” Burnett said.
He showed a rendering of the facility and said there were going to be six trains of production.
“… A train is what they call a production train from the feedstock end all the way out to gasoline out the back end of the plant. We’re gonna start with one train at a time. That’s about $2 billion in capex (capital expenditures) for us to do that. And then rinse and repeat for six full trains of production,” Burnett said.
He added that he thinks they will be under construction this year.
“We are planning to be producing gasoline sometime late ‘25 or early ‘26. It takes a long time to build these facilities,” Burnett said.
Nacero’s product will go out mainly by pipeline and some in trucks, he said.
“Air permits are in hand. We have our TCEQ (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality) air quality permit. it was an expedited process that we got late last year; about November. It was a nine-month process to get our air quality permits. It’s a big deal. Those usually take probably 18 months to 24 months, almost two years to get an air quality permit. We were able to get it in nine months. We did expedite the process which means we had a focus team on the process, on that air permit. So we were excited that we were able to do that that fast,” Burnett said.
Nacero owns 600 acres from Grow Odessa and additional sections are under option, so they are under company control.
The company will be receiving its final numbers on an engineering, procurement and construction company, or EPC, in the next week to 10 days, so they will soon know who the construction contractor is going to be.
“It’s going to be a big name everyone will recognize. They’re going to be coming out here and they’re going to be doing a lot of work in Odessa,” Burnett said.
The project is estimated to create 3,500 construction jobs over the life of the construction.
“We think the construction is going to be anywhere from six to eight years, at least,” Burnett said.
He added that it could stretch out a little longer, or it could be shorter. It depends on the supply chain, efficiencies and other items.
Burnett said there would be 350 permanent jobs and an estimated 100 more that will be contract employees for maintenance issues or other things like that.
“This doesn’t account for the spin-off things in the area that will be coming as a result of our plan. Probably hundreds of people (will) be working in some way or other, touching this facility” during construction or the permanent life of the facility, Burnett said.
It will provide a $25 billion boost to the regional economy, he said.
“That’s probably a low number for this and that’s probably at build out. So … billions of dollars (that are) going to be spent in our local economy; hotels, obviously, restaurants, housing and all those kinds of things,” Burnett said.
He added that they will be using 100% domestic natural gases.
“Our gasoline is going to be, soon as we push it off the back end of the plant, we’re going to be able to blend it up to whatever octane it needs to be to sell it at the pumps. Your car or truck doesn’t have to be changed. It’s a drop-in fuel. We believe it’s a transitionary between what they’re doing now making gasoline and where we need to get because of the … environmental issues we’re all talking about. We will capture carbon on the site. There’s a CO2 pipeline running on the north boundary of our property that we’ll be able to inject the carbon back into. We have agreements on that already and we’re close to final agreements on feedstock, which is the natural gas and all of the gasoline coming out of the back of the plant is already pretty much been sold; so good positions to be in. We’re excited about it,” Burnett said.
He added that Nacero is only making gasoline.
He noted that the process is clean and green.
“It’s where we think we need to be headed in this country, not against electric vehicles. Everybody’s going have their own way of getting around. We feel like this is a way to do what we do now, but do it better and cleaner,” Burnett said.
Nacero has awarded a long-term wind power agreement to NextEra.
He said they have had groundbreaking dates set, but have had to move them and they are still working on that. They are looking at summer, Burnett said.
The contractor, when hired, is going to be responsible for the construction workforce and Nacero will help with that, Burnett said.
He said it’s hoped that people will come from the local market, but there may also be people who move in for the jobs.
“But we feel like there’s a lot of folks here in our market that are ready to cross-train into some other industries to do some new things. We’re going get a lot of people that want to move here for a construction project that is this long …,” Burnett said.
