Evergreen CEO: Wyo. Plant Still Possible

"It makes a tremendous amount of sense," Evergreen CEO Kevin Collins told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Tuesday from Phoenix. "We are still very connected to Wyoming."

About 50 people at Evergreen's Fort Union coal refinery lost their jobs last week when the company decided to focus on building a new and improved plant elsewhere. The Denver-based company is keeping about three dozen workers there to maintain the plant and keep it available for any future testing of its patented K-Fuel technology.

The technology reduces the moisture content in low-grade coal to boost its heat value and cut pollution when it is burned.

Evergreen built the $109 million Gillette plant to test whether the K-Fuel process could work on a large scale. The company said it's now ready to build a new plant that incorporates what it has learned from tinkering with the Fort Union facility.

A proposed 1.5 million-ton-per-year coal refinery on the Indonesian island of Kalimantan is the closest to being built, he said. That project is being undertaken with investment from Sumitomo Corp. of Japan.

Collins said Evergreen is also studying the option of building other plants in the United States.

"We're going to have to build multiple plants in a number of different areas," he said. "And if we could get a plant built in Wyoming first that would be great. If it doesn't become first, then I think there's always that opportunity to build a plant in Wyoming if we do want to do that."

He said Evergreen has been working on obtaining permits to build a plant in the Powder River Basin in northeast Wyoming for about the last 14 months. The company has not begun any permit work in other states, he said.

Collins said a key factor in locating new plants will be good access to multiple forms of transportation, multiple customers and multiple types of coal.