Tuscaloosa’s Hunt Refining Company Plans $57 Million Expansion

Tuscaloosa's Hunt Refining Company will spend almost $60 million expanding operations at their facility south of town on the Black Warrior River.

Hunt, a 70-year-old family business headquartered in Tuscaloosa, refines tens of thousands of barrels of crude oil a day into products including asphalt, gasoline and jet and diesel fuels.

At a crowded Thursday meeting of the Tuscaloosa County Economic Development Authority, a coterie led by Hunt's Senior Vice President and General Counsel David Carroll detailed their plans and asked for a roughly $2 million tax incentive to carry them out.

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The expansion consists of two parts: the construction and installation of a new alternate configuration delayed coker vacuum tower, mercifully abbreviated as an ACDC tower, and the installation of a new tank to support their asphalt operations.

The tower project is expected to cost $53 million, and "Tank 6" has a $3.9 million price tag.

A company rep told the TCEDA that their existing delayed coker produces gasoline, diesel fuel and petroleum coke - a comparatively low-value solid material not unlike coal. The new ACDC tower will allow Hunt to get more of the liquid fuels from crude and less of the petcoke.

"Every crude barrel that we put into that unit, an almost-equivalent amount of liquid product will come off the back end and we're excited about that," Carroll said last week. "This is a project we've been considering for several years looking for the right time to do it, and now it looks like the right time."

The new tank will "support the efficient utilization ultra-flux material used in producing asphalt shingles," the TCEDA said.

The TCEDA approved tax abatements to incentivize both projects at Hunt - a $1.8 million abatement for the ACDC tower and a $129,258 abatement for the new tank.

For 10 years, the Tuscaloosa company will not have to pay ad valorem property taxes or sales and use tax on construction materials, except those taxes that would fund local education - those are still owed and collected.

Construction on both projects will begin immediately, and Hunt said the AC/DC tower could be online by August 2025 and the new tank working by the end of next October.