The oil race
Size: A 1,200-acre fenced refinery site rests among 3,500 total acres owned by the company; the expansion covers 350 acres
Permanent employees: About 920 direct Marathon and indirect contractor employees operate the refinery; the expansion will add 280 more
Temporary workers: The expansion employment peaked this year with more than 8,000 construction workers at the U.S. 61 site
Cost: At $3.35 billion, the refinery project will cost about $150 million more than Marathon originally anticipated
Materials: 1,100 miles of wire, 300 miles of pipe, 1 million cubic yards of fill dirt and 20,000 piles pounded in the ground for a stable foundation
Fuel capacity: In moving to a 436,000-barrel-per-day refining capacity, Marathon will be able to produce 19.5 million gallons of fuel per day, up from 12 million prior to the expansion
Rank: The expansion from 256,000-barrel capacity will make the Garyville oil refinery the fourth-largest in the United States, up from No. 18.
Source: Marathon Oil Corp.
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GARYVILLE – Marathon Oil Corp. may be based in Ohio, with a fuel distribution network fixated on the Midwest, but its refining roots run deep in Louisiana soil.
For a clue, gaze at the acres of pickup trucks and cars parked on former sugar cane fields off U.S. 61 here.
The tally of construction workers crawling over the company’s oil refinery site has exceeded 8,000 through much of 2009, enough to make this the largest city in St. John the Baptist Parish, where there are no incorporated communities.
The parish, however, is a petrochemical capital. And the Marathon site that’s home to the last refinery built from scratch on U.S. soil three decades ago has become the answer to another trivia question.
Question: What’s the most expensive construction project ever undertaken on Louisiana soil?
Answer: This is it, the Marathon refinery that’s adding 180,000 barrels of daily oil refining capacity at a hard-to-fathom expense of $3.35 billion.
So immense is the three-year project, scheduled to wrap up late this year, that Marathon spent more than $1 million to build a special-use bridge over River Road for conveying a 170-foot, 250-ton Belgian vacuum tower from the Mississippi River to the plant site. The bridge is long gone, the project rumbles on.
Among the dozens of cranes deployed is one soaring to within 40 feet of the Louisiana State Capitol’s observation deck height in Baton Rouge.
“This is a small city,” said Rich Bedell, Marathon’s refining division manager.
“This is a stimulus plan.”
On a recent day, the Garyville refinery teemed with 8,800 people as a mini-bus of international journalists was guided through the complex by Marathon and American Petroleum Institute officials. About 570 people on site were direct Marathon employees, 350 were full-time contractors and the rest were chiefly Louisiana skilled craftsmen.
More than $1.5 billion of the project is being spent on Louisiana labor and materials. But Marathon, which has operated for decades in the oil business and which processes more than 1 million barrels of crude each day, didn’t pad its plans for the purpose of spreading economic good will.
The company insists its $3.4 billion project is well-conceived. And it insists the capital investment will pay off — even as competitors have delayed refinery expansions.
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