TUSCOLA, Ill. — Central Illinois officials said they used their experience at trying to land the first carbon sequestration coal power plant recently to bring a new $1.4 billion fertilizer plant to the region.
The operation for Cronus Chemicals LLC will employ about 2,000 people during its nearly three-year construction phase and 175-200 on a full-time basis once the plant is up and running, officials said.
Landing the new fertilizer plant was a big win for the tiny town of Tuscola, which has a population of approximately 4,500 and is located in a strategically beneficial area for Cronus – next to interstates, a CSX railroad line and a confluence of natural gas lines.
After a ceremony officially announcing the news last week in Tuscola, Cronus CEO Erzin Atac said while the siting process took more than a year, it boiled down to some obvious advantages in Tuscola over the other site the company was considering in Mitchell County, Iowa.
In addition to established lines for natural gas, required for large-scale production of nitrogen-based fertilizers, urea and ammonia, state and local authorities agreed to an incentives package totaling about $52 million in value, said Gov. Pat Quinn. Those incentives include local property tax abatements, sales tax breaks, job-training assistance and some road and infrastructure improvements.
The company also earlier agreed it would buy more than 6.3 million gallons of treated effluent per day from the Urbana & Champaign Sanitary District to meet the plant’s operational needs – about a fourth of what the district treats, said Rick Manner, the district’s executive director. "The philosophy and local approach to the project is important, that people are welcoming and being supportive. At the end, it was a very easy decision," Atac said.
Cronus is owned by a group of Swiss and Turkish investors, and the company will locate its U.S. headquarters in Chicago, Atac said. The 250-acre site about 20 miles south of Champaign had been a finalist location for the national FutureGen power plant project, the first of its kind coal-operating plant designed to bury carbon dioxide beneath the surface rather than release into the atmosphere. A scaled-down version of that project overseen by the U.S. Energy Department is under construction in western Illinois.
Atac said the company hopes to start construction in the spring and could take up to nearly three years to complete. It plans to sell fertilizer in an area covering about 300 miles and within three states. "I think we’re very suited for chemical manufacturing here," said Brian Moody, executive director of the Tuscola Chamber and Economic Development. "This is an ag project. Those products will get used in our back yard. We get that double whammy that not only will we get the project and the construction jobs, but those products will sell and circulate. They will move through our regional economy."
