New La. refinery slated

• By GARY PERILLOUX
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Nov 15, 2008 - Page: 1D - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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A Massachusetts-based investment firm said Friday it’s partnering with an unnamed major utility to build a $3.5 billion refinery in Louisiana that will be capable of producing 300 billion cubic feet a year of synthetic natural gas.

That would be equal to 7 percent of the natural gas piped into the U.S. from Canada each year.

C Change Investments LLC of Cambridge, Mass., is investing in the joint venture, dubbed NC12 Inc. C Change and its investors would split ownership with the utility, who won’t be named until the project announcement comes in the first quarter of 2009.

When the announcement does come, it will name a Louisiana community as the project site, said Stephen Allen, a C Change spokesman.
The project is under the radar. Louisiana Economic Development officials had no immediate comment when asked about the project Friday.

Chett Chiasson, director of economic development at the Greater Lafourche Port Commission in Galliano, said he hasn’t heard any news about such a project.

Chiasson works with Port Fourchon, the energy hub that serves about 90 percent of all deepwater rigs and platforms in the Gulf of Mexico and is a major connection between offshore oil and gas and mainland pipelines.

In addition to producing synthetic natural gas — a cleaner form of gas created from coal and petroleum coke at extremely higher temperatures — the project would capture carbon dioxide and pipe it to offshore wells in the Gulf to improve extraction of oil and gas.

To the west, George Swift of the Southwest Louisiana Partnership for Economic Development said Lake Charles Cogeneration LLC, owned by New York-based Leucadia National Corp., will break ground in mid-2009 on a previously announced synthetic natural gas project.

The $1.6 billion facility at the Port of Lake Charles will produce an estimated 35 billion cubic feet a year, about 12 percent of the amount proposed by NC12 Inc.

“I’m not aware of anything else over here (planned in the gasification sector),” said Swift.

Both projects say they will gain customers because they can sell synthetic natural gas at comparable prices to natural gas, but they can do so without the volatility of commodity markets. A utility, for instance, could buy 10 years worth of gas at consistent prices without fearing unexpected price spikes.

Another major gasification project announced in June 2006 by Gov. Kathleen Blanco — a $5 billion coal gasification plant by LIG Fuel Inc., formerly Synfuel Inc. — never materialized in Ascension Parish.

The NC12 venture claims to have a game-changing catalytic technology that will convert coal along with petroleum coke from Louisiana refineries into synthetic natural gas at half the cost of other gasification technologies.