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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Holly Energy Partners, which operates an oil refinery in Woods Cross, is surveying potential customers to determine if there is enough interest to build a fuel pipeline to Las Vegas.
The pipeline would carry gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
"We'll be soliciting support from potential shippers through the end of May. After that we'll be able to step back and see what the appetite level is and whether we should proceed," Holly Energy spokesman M. Neale Hickerson said.
Typically, refineries in Southern California supply the Las Vegas area. But continued growth in California and above-average demand in fast-growing Las Vegas and Phoenix are straining supplies in the region.
The Dallas-based energy company has been trucking gasoline from its Utah refinery to Las Vegas, "but that is a very expensive and inefficient way of moving refined petroleum products," Hickerson said. "A pipeline would be better."
Holly's proposed pipeline would extend about 400 miles from Salt Lake City to the northern edge of Las Vegas. It would be a 12-inch pipeline capable of transporting approximately 50,000 barrels of refined petroleum products a day.
Hickerson said such a pipeline would allow Utah refineries to take advantage of the growing supply of low-cost, heavy Canadian crude while providing access to a major, fast-growing market for refined products that isn't subject to the same seasonal demand fluctuations common in the Utah gasoline marketplace.
Holly also is proposing to build a 64-mile pipeline to bring crude from an existing pipeline near the Wyoming border to Davis County.
Although the company maintains that the Davis County pipeline would run mostly across private land, environmentalist are concerned that one four-mile stretch would run through the Wasatch-Cache National Forest.
The Utah Environmental Congress intends to petition the Forest Service to conduct an environmental impact study of the project.
Woods Cross, in Davis County, is seven miles north of Salt Lake City.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
