May 25, 2002 – Within the next week, approximately 375 employees of Hovensa contractors will be laid off, in most cases because repair work on the refinery's catalytic cracking unit is nearing completion, the company said in a release Friday.
Meanwhile, Hovensa's vice president and spokesman Alex Moorhead said, the primary contractor for the refinery's coker project, Bechtel International, has been reducing its work force as the huge project, more than two years in the works, nears completion.
In the last month, Moorhead said, Bechtel and its subcontractors have reduced their personnel to about 900 from 1,500.
Hovensa — a joint venture of Amerada Hess, owner of Hess Oil Virgin Islands Corp., and the huge state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela — was created two and a half years ago to facilitate the process of obtaining some $600 million in financing to build the coker.
Ground was broken on June 2, 2000, for the long-planned project, with completion initially targeted for February 2002. It was anticipated that at the peak of construction, a work force of 2,000 would be employed on the project.
The coker, a facility that most U.S. refineries already have, will allow Hovensa to process a heavier — and less-expensive — grade of crude oil than now is possible. The company has a long-term supply contract with Petroleos de Venezuela for the heavier crude.
Moorhead said in Friday's release that Hovensa had notified Labor Commissioner Cecil Benjamin of the cutback in personnel as the coker nears completion and the anticipated layoffs with completion of repairs to the cat cracker.
The same release also stated that Hovensa plans to build processing units and auxiliary equipment needed to comply with federal regulations reducing the maximum quantity of sulfur allowable in gasoline by 2004. And the refinery "also plans to modify a number of existing processing units to comply with a regulation that reduces the quantity of sulfur allowed in diesel fuel effective in 2006," it stated.
Work on these facilities is expected to begin in mid-2003 and will probably be undertaken in two phases, according to the release.
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