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Supporters of Roosevelt National Park seek to block refinery
MEDORA, N.D. (AP) – When Meridian Energy Group set out to develop “the cleanest refinery on the planet,” it chose a spot in western North Dakota’s oil patch near highways, railroads and a picturesque national park named for a former president revered for his conservation advocacy.
Now the longtime former leader of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the state’s top tourist attraction drawing a record 760,000 visitors last year, is among those urging officials to deny a permit for the 700-acre refinery due to pollution concerns.
“To put an oil refinery within view of the park would be a betrayal of the conservation values of the park’s namesake,” said retired longtime Park Superintendent Valerie Naylor, an outspoken opponent of the project. “An oil refinery has no business at the doorstep of a national park. We wouldn’t allow an oil refinery to be built within view of Yellowstone or Yosemite, and it should be no different for Theodore Roosevelt.”
Meridian, formed by a partnership with agricultural interests in North Dakota to develop the refinery, plans to push forward on the $900 million project, which it says will be a model for environmentally friendly technology.
The proposed Davis Refinery would process up to 55,000 barrels of Bakken crude per day into a variety of fuels while creating 500 construction jobs and permanent jobs for 200 people in the area, and generating millions of dollars in property taxes for the county each year. Because of its proximity to the national park, it must meet more stringent air quality standards, which the company says it will achieve through the most modern emissions control technology.
“Refineries are not pleasant things. Most in this country are 40, 50 years or older. They’re not the kind of thing you’d want to see in your neighborhood, if there was a park there or not,” Meridian CEO William Prentice said. “We’ve taken all these concerns into consideration. This will be the cleanest refinery on the planet when it’s done.”
Many people, including National Park Service officials, aren’t so sure, and worry the refinery will add to haze from coal-fired power plants in the region and other sources such as vehicles on nearby Interstate 94.
“Our concern is when you go to viewpoints in the park, you’d get a view that’s clear and would capture the colors and features, things it’s famous for,” said Park Service environmental engineer Don Shepherd. “One of the neat things about Theodore Roosevelt is all the colors you see in the rock strata. On a bad (haze) day you might notice the color not as vivid or clear to the eye.”
Roosevelt ranched in the region in the 1880s and is known for his advocacy of land and wildlife conservation. His namesake park is in the heart of the North Dakota Badlands, a rugged and breathtaking area of hills, ridges, buttes and bluffs where millions of years of erosion have exposed colorful sedimentary rock layers. The park is home to spectacular scenery and a wide variety of wildlife, from prairie dog towns to wild horses and bison. Besides taking in the scenery, visitors can hike, bike, camp and fish.
Park Superintendent Wendy Ross said a study of the refinery’s initial design concluded that parts of the plant would be visible from about 2 percent of the 30,000-acre park.
Prentice said lighting will be subdued, the refinery will have color schemes designed to blend into the terrain and there will be limited flaring of excess natural gas. The company also is working with North Dakota State University on natural buffers such as native trees to help hide the refinery from tourists coming to the park on the interstate.
“We’re trying to do everything so that from the park perspective, you can’t hear it, see it, smell it or anything else,” Prentice said.
The project has still drawn opposition from national groups such as the National Parks Conservation Association and The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, and questions from local residents. Linda Weiss, a longtime resident of the nearby small town of Belfield, said there are “a lot of unknowns” in the community about the refinery.
“It’s going to be visible,” she said. “They may put up tree barriers, but it takes a while for those to grow.”
Zachary Kreps, a Moorhead, Minnesota, resident and park enthusiast, started a refinery opposition petition online.
“During my childhood, we used to go out for summer vacations practically every summer out to (the park). To hear they’re going to be putting a refinery three miles away from it just kind of struck a chord,” he said.
The Health Department’s decision on an air quality permit for the refinery could take up to a year. The analysis could delay the planned summer groundbreaking, but that isn’t deterring Meridian.
“We’re going to essentially be raising the bar for every other refinery in the country,” Prentice said.
Opponents hope that doesn’t come at the expense of the park.
“An oil refinery and associated industrial development would fundamentally threaten the pristine air and other conservation values that our nation committed to protect when we created Theodore Roosevelt National Park,” said Bart Melton, regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association.
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Trump Calls Trip ‘Home Run’ as Kushner Questions Left Unanswered
President Donald Trump declared his first foreign trip a “home run” and said he’d rallied the world’s governments to stand strong against terrorism, despite a series of stark differences that emerged between the U.S. and its allies.
“I am now more hopeful than ever that nations of many faiths and from many religions and from many regions all over can join together in a common cause,” Trump said as he stopped at a U.S. military base in Sicily on his way back to the U.S.
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Citing the bombing attack this week in Manchester, Trump said it shows the need for the world to join forces and “absolutely and totally defeat” terrorism.
Trump ended his nine-day overseas trip, which stretched from the Middle East to the Group of Seven meeting in Taormina, Sicily, without holding a news conference to take questions from reporters. That allowed him to avoid addressing the story now dominating headlines back home: the FBI’s interest in his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Kushner, who serves as senior adviser to Trump, has drawn the attention of the FBI because he considered setting up a secret line of communications between the incoming administration and the Russian government, primarily to discuss a resolution to the crisis in Syria, according to a person familiar with the matter.
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Military Base
Ahead of Trump’s remarks to the troops, two of the president’s top advisers also declined to answer questions on Kushner. “We’re not going to comment on Jared. We’re just not going to,” Trump’s top economic adviser Gary Cohn said of Kushner, who had been on the trip but returned home as planned after participating in Trump’s visit to the Vatican.
At the military base, Trump ran through the various stops on the trip, declaring, “I think we hit a home run wherever we are.”
He again chided NATO allies for not paying what he sees as their fair share to support the alliance, and pledged to the troops gathered, “I will give you my complete and unshakable support.”
“Peace through strength. Peace through strength, right?” Trump said. “We’re going to have a lot of strength and we’re going to have a lot of peace. You’re going to do a lot of winning.”
He spent the bulk of his 25-minute remarks, delivered with the help of a teleprompter but partially improvised, focused on the fight against terrorism, saying the May 22 bombing outside an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, which killed 22 people, and a deadly attack on Coptic Christians in Egypt on Friday stiffened the European leaders’ resolve. As for the threat for terrorism, Trump said simply, “We will win.”
More from Bloomberg.com: Kushner Weighed Creating a Secret Channel With Russia
Busy Agenda
Earlier, two of his top advisers faced reporters and swatted away questions about Kushner.
“The president since he left Washington has been dealing with foreign leaders, has been dealing with jobs, has been dealing with economic growth. He’s been dealing with diplomacy. He’s been dealing with unfair trade. He’s been dealing with Paris. He’s been dealing with China. His agenda has been overflowing,” Cohn. The issue of Kushner “is not one that he’s spending time with on this trip.”
H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, also declined to talk about Kushner and said he had no knowledge of any effort to set up a line of communications to the Russians. Generally speaking, he said, such back-channels can have value in diplomacy.
‘Discreet Manner’
“We have back-channel communications with a number of countries, and so generally speaking about backchannel communications, what that allows you to do is to communicate in a discreet manner,” McMaster said.
As for the trip, the two aides said Trump succeeded in pressing NATO to do more to fight terrorism, bringing home billions in business deals, and calling on European allies to drop trade restrictions.
“The president delivered,” McMaster said. “This trip was mainly about the high principles we all stand for.”
The two U.S. officials sought to accentuate areas of agreement amid the many differences between Trump and European allies.
On climate, Trump stood alone in effectively abstaining from the final communique expressing strong support for Paris Agreement. Cohn said the European leaders understood that Trump needed more time to decide whether to stay in the pact. Trump said on Twitter that he’ll announce his decision next week.
‘Give and Take’
“In these communiques it’s always a give and take,” Cohn said. “We’re all trying to get to the right place and be respectful” of one another.
“It does say the other countries respect the United States’ decision to take time” to make the decision, he added.
Cohn said Trump also pressed the issue of unfair practices that Trump believes contribute to trade deficits in the United States. Trump raised the issue of dumping cheaper steel and other products, non-tariff barriers and subsidies, he said.
“The president does not like having large trade deficits” and wants and needs to bring jobs back to the U.S., Cohn said. “He was fixated” on getting “American workers back to work.”
Trump and his team talked to G-7 leaders about how he was going to get tax reform, deregulation and an infrastructure plan passed in the U.S., Cohen added.
McMaster also said the suggestion Trump wasn’t firmly behind the Article 5 doctrine of mutual defense at NATO was “baseless.”
“It is a matter of fact” that the United States and Trump stands “firmly behind” the doctrine, McMaster said.
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Read Trump Calls Trip ‘Home Run’ as Kushner Questions Left Unanswered on bloombergpolitics.com