Flint Hills Resources, L.P. (FHR), which owns and operates a 300,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) petroleum refinery in Rosemount, Minnesota, has been working since 2000 to better understand and reduce the risk of mercury contamination to the environment from the refinery. FHR completed and submitted to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), as part of the Voluntary Mercury Reduction Project, a mercury mass balance in 2000 with updates in 2004 that thoroughly sampled and analyzed inlet and outlet streams in the refinery. This balance identified the distribution of mercury in crude oil feed to the various refinery output streams such as fuel products, facility air emissions, wastes and water effluent. Unfortunately due to the complexity of the refinery operations, the chemical properties of mercury in crude oil, and inadequacy of mercury analysis methods at the time of the mass balance, FHR was unable to allocate all of the mercury coming in with the crude oil to finished products, waste streams, combustion sources or water discharges that leave the facility.
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