Rendering courtesy of Mark Berry, technical and design consultant for the Hannibal Port Power project The Hannibal Port Power plant will be constructed on the Long Ridge Energy Terminal on the Ohio River in Monroe County hear Hannibal. Estimated construction completion is slated for mid-2021.

At the Long Ridge Energy Terminal in Hannibal, Ohio River Partners has extended the completion timeline for the new power plant.

In January, The Marietta Times reported that the Hannibal Port Power project was slated to begin construction of the 485-megawatt natural gas plant by the second quarter this year after obtaining needed environmental permits from the Ohio EPA, but Mark Barry, technical and design consultant for the project, said that construction will not begin until March or April of 2019.

“Ohio River Partners has been working on financing the project to close by the end of the year with Kiewit Power Constructors and General Electric,” explained Barry. “We have our environmental permits from the state of Ohio and now estimate a completion mid-year 2021.”

The construction will take place on the former Ormet Aluminium Corp. site that closed in 2013.

Barry said part of the prequalifying factors considered to select the contracting company building the power plant included both the knowledge and utilization of local skilled labor and a reputation of being a safe and good neighbor in Ohio projects.

“We received proposals on this about a year ago and we were careful to choose contractors who had worked in the valley before and we did not pre-qualify any labor-busting contractors,” he explained.

Bill Hutchinson, business manager for the Parkersburg-Marietta Building and Construction Trades Council, said a subsequent contract with Kiewit has already been signed with the local trades to work on the project.

“We’re just waiting for that notice to proceed and then this area will have no trouble supplying the needed skilled crafts for the project,” said Hutchinson. “We haven’t sat down with the exact numbers on the different crafts but we’re looking at between 300 and 350 craftsmen at peak time, probably heavy in the pipefitters and electricians. It’s going to be a nice job, not huge but with the manpower right now in our area I don’t foresee any problems manning that job.”

He estimated that the first laborers to appear on site would be carpenters followed by pipefitters, electricians, ironworkers and finally, painters.

“There’s other development of that terminal in the works too,” noted Barry, though he would not offer specifics. “What’s happening now on our site is a little bit of demolition where the switch lines for Ormet were.”

Barry said the two other major factors for selecting Kiewit were the company’s safety program and neighboring impact.

“We want to be good neighbors certainly during construction and then afterward,” he noted. “So large materials will be brought in by rail, we’ll manage the hours we can construct to limit noise and have a complaint procedure for neighbors that puts them in contact with top leadership.”

He said a notice to proceed should be expected by the end of 2018 and would be followed by more detailed engineering and design for the first three months of 2019.

The cost of the project is estimated between $500 million and $600 million.

“The bulk of investment is for the facility itself, but part of the project is also in investing in local natural gas well development in Monroe County since the gas is mainly coming from the local gas basins,” explained Barry. “But when construction is done the footprint of the plant will be about 25 acres.”

Timeline:

• The Ormet facility, located at 43840 State Route 7, Hannibal, closed in 2013 due to high utility costs after the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio did not grant rate relief the company said it needed for electricity to continue operation.

• The site was purchased by Niagara Worldwide in 2014, which named the 1,660 acres Center Port Transload Facility.

• Fortress Transportation and Infrastructure bought the site for $30 million in June 2017, renaming the site Long Ridge Energy Terminal.

• Long Ridge Energy Terminal consists of:

• Hannibal Port Power, projected completion mid-2021.

• Sand transloading for frack sand storage.

• Natural gas liquids infrastructure.

• Land for future development.

Source: Long Ridge Energy and Times research.