Even as western North Dakota watches nervously while its once-booming oil industry wallows in the doldrums, a massive construction project centered around coal is quietly hitting its stride.
A $500 million urea fertilizer plant that will take 750 workers to build and 60 employees to operate can’t take up all the slack let loose in the Oil Patch, but it is providing a pretty good economic spin all its own.
The plant is under construction north of Beulah, adjacent to Basin Electric Power Cooperative’s synfuels plant, which through the wizardry of chemistry turns black lignite into natural gas.
The new plant will combine some of the carbon dioxide and ammonia created in that liquification process to make dry urea pellets used as fertilizer in the production of wheat, soybeans and corn.
By the way, did you all notice the interesting data point at this post, posted yesterday? It's the second linked story at that post:
Less than 0.1 percent of global production has been halted to date even though 3.5 percent of global supply is currently cash negative.
I focused on the first data point: that "less than 0.1% of global production has been halted ..." That data point alone is quite incredible, I think. Less than 0.1% of global oil has been halted due to the Saudi Surge/Slump.
But last night after going through the blog looking for typographical errors, I saw that I had missed the big story: "... only 3.5% of global supply is currently cash negative."
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