Three Affiliated Tribes Chair: ‘It’s more than a refinery’
NEW TOWN, N.D. - An oil refinery in Indian Country is a first for America. The Three Affiliated Tribes’ fledgling oil refinery is the keystone in an arch of triumph and prosperity for the people of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) Nation, according to the Three Affiliated Tribes Chair Tex Hall.
The MHA signed a contract during the last week of October with Minneapolis-based Park Construction Co. in the latest phase of activity destined to make the Thunder Butte Clean Fuels Refinery on the Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation the first tribal refinery ever -- and the first refinery built on U.S. soil since 1976.
As if that weren’t enough claim to fame, Hall says, "It’s really more than a refinery. "It’s the engineering for everything."
That "everything" covers petroleum pumping, refining, storage and shipping, and a national deluxe truck-stop hotel franchise, catering, among others, to a tribally owned fleet of trucks running on natural gas captured from flaring at the refinery site near Makoti on the Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation.
"This is just another huge step for our tribes and for any tribe as it reaches for energy independence and economic sovereignty," he says.
The Three Affiliated Tribes are taking advantage of their location in the midst of the Bakken oilfields of western North Dakota the site of a black-gold rush grounded in the new technology of hydraulic fracturing that has soaked the U.S. market with formerly inaccessible high-grade petroleum.
"If you have somebody else drill and take it out, there’s a lot of impacts and you’re just getting cash," Hall reasons. "There’s such an abundance, if you can get your own pumps, refine, ship and sell direct through truck plazas with buffalo from Pine Ridge Reservation on the menu, then heat your homes with your own propane, you might as well," he says.
The EPA approved an environmental impact statement for the project and issued a water discharge permit on July 20, 2012. The tribes and contractors broke ground at the site some 30 miles east of tribal headquarters in New Town, in a symbolic action May 9, 2013.
Since the refinery capacity is for no more than 20,000 barrels a day, no other permits are necessary.
On July 11, the tribal council approved a $450,000 contract with Houston-based Ventech Engineering for an engineering design contract.
"The refinery process is moving along nicely in terms of the financing and also the engineering design," Hall told Native Sun News in an exclusive telephone interview.
The next phase will be obtaining contracts for shipping and supplying clients, Hall said.
Financing institutions want assurances that customer contracts are secured, he added. In that regard, Hall said, "We tell them we have so much demand, we can’t keep up with it."
He says his people want to share the wealth with other Indian-country residents nationwide. In that light, the MHA Nation is courting Native American buyers by offering to undersell the competition.
"We’re trying to get them a better price," Hall says. "We’ve been blessed with this resource. It’s the right thing to do."
Tribes from the Great Plains, as far west as Washington state and as far east as New York state "want our product, and we’ve got to have some for our own tribal members," Hall said.
Once engineering design is accomplished, a loading facility will be the first part of the construction phase, slated to begin in 2014. By late 2015 or early 2016, the refinery could go into production and distribution mode.
The MHA Nation, with headquarters in New Town, North Dakota, has had the project on the drawing board for more than a decade. It has been snagged in the works due to what Hall calls "the EPA merry go-round".
The original feed stock for the refinery was tar-sands oil, or dilbit, from Canada. When the tribes decided to change the source to Bakken crude in 2007, new EPA applications were necessary.
A Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) came out in August 2009. EPA issued a National Discharge Permit Aug. 3, 2011. Then the agency adjusted six effluent levels and took public comment until Jan. 26, 2012.
Four petitioners challenged the EPA permit on the grounds that volatile organic compounds, sulfides and other chemicals would be present in effluents. The agency dismissed the petitions in June 2012.
The non-profit Indigenous Environmental Network and some tribal members have voiced concerns about health and safety from the fossil fuel operations, which contribute to climate change threats.
Among them, environmental science and policy expert Kandi Mosset says air and water contamination and highway deaths due to heavy truck traffic in the oilfields on and around the reservation contribute to environmental injustice.
The challenges have slowed the MHA progress toward opening the refinery to the extent that three others are now in the process of opening their doors in North Dakota.
However, Hall notes, the others are "topping" plants and provide a narrower range of products than Thunder Butte would produce. The competition would offer diesel only, whereas Thunder Butte would produce gasoline, naphtha and other products, as well.
Thunder Butte is called a "clean fuels refinery" because it uses best available technology, minimizing pollution, Hall said.
(Contact Talli Nauman, Health and Environment Editor for Native Sun News at
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