Mike Zimney believes there are good and bad ways to build cities.
The Dickinson Downtown Association brought in the city planning specialist to speak to a group of about 60 Dickinson officials, business owners and others interested in revitalizing downtown Thursday afternoon at the Eagles Club.
“We can still build great places,” Zimney said early into his hour-long presentation, “Designing Great Cities.”
Continue reading “Planner talks ways to improve cities; focuses on Dickinson's downtown”
In a windowless room inside of a non-descript steel building at Dakota Prairie Refining’s sprawling facility west of Dickinson, there are six people whose job is to make certain America’s first greenfield refinery built since 1976 turns Bakken crude oil into diesel fuel.
“It’s a chem nerd’s dream,” laboratory technician and chemist Nicole Haller said of the lab where she works on the 375-acre refinery site.
The small lab crew — led by supervisor Holly Dalen of Dickinson — has some of the most important jobs at the refinery, which is in the final stages of testing before ramping up operations.
They already spend each day testing crude oil, diesel fuel and its sulphur levels, as well as other products to be produced by the refinery. They also run constant tests on city wastewater to be used in the refining process.
The lab crew act as the refinery’s gatekeepers. If a product goes in or comes out of the refinery, the lab has its eyes and instruments on it.
Jack Kelley and Skip Bennett are an unassuming duo with a big idea.
The entrepreneurs, together with a Taiwanese inventor and engineer, have a plan to capture natural gas, eliminate flaring at the wellhead, create a viable commodity from that gas, and pay both energy companies and royalty owners for their share.
B&A Global Energy, a small company based in Tulsa, Okla., has acquired the rights to the Energy Capturing Operating System (ECOS), a portable refinery able to be placed at a well site. The ECOS captures and processes methane gas produced in the hydraulic fracturing process into liquefied natural gas (LNG).
“This is a game-changing technology to the oil and gas business,” said Kelley, B&A Global’s president and CEO and a 25-year veteran of the energy industry who is also a retired U.S. Air Force pilot and a licensed architect.
B&A Global wants to bring its ECOS technology to the U.S. — specifically to North Dakota’s Bakken and Texas’ Eagle Ford shale formations — after witnessing the technology work in Asia.
“We have chosen the Bakken as our focus,” said Bennett, B&A Global’s board chairman and founder.
The idea, they say, is simple.
Continue reading “B&A Global Energy sets sights on ending flaring in Bakken”
Something dawned on me the other day. Tomorrow, I’ll no longer be 30. I’ll actually be in my 30s.
I’ve reached that stage in life where everything begins to slow down while simultaneously becoming more complicated.
Spending the past year as a 30-year-old, I never truly felt like I was “in my 30s “ As my 31st birthday arrives Monday, that feeling is beginning to change.
At 30, I got married, lost an old friend far too early and said goodbye to my second grandparent in as many years.
That, along with the speculation of what is to come in life, has led me to spend more time thinking about the impact I’m making as I start my own family, play a visible role in our community and try to leave a lasting impact on our world — even if that “world” is limited to southwest North Dakota.
A longtime tenant of the Prairie Hills Mall is leaving for its own space.
Dave Reuter, vice president of personnel for Thrifty White Pharmacy, said the Dickinson business is relocating to its own building nearing completion on the Third Avenue West frontage road between Brady Martz and Eyewear Concepts and behind the North Hills Shopping Center.
The new pharmacy plans to be open in its new location Monday, March 2, Reuter said. Its final day at the mall is Saturday, Feb. 28.
“This really gets us into a real building that’s a professional pharmacy,” he said.
The store, commonly known by its former name, White Drug, is selling out of its food and other merchandise at the mall location through the rest of February.
Continue reading “Thrifty White Pharmacy leaving mall in March”
Dustin Monke 