Hovensa

Hovensa (known also as St. Croix Refinery) was a petroleum refinery company located on the island of St. Croix in the United States Virgin Islands. The refinery was a joint venture between Hess Corporation and Petroleos de Venezuela. For most of its operating life as HOVENSA it supplied heating oil and gasoline to the U.S. Gulf Coast and the eastern seaboard with the crude mainly sourced from Venezuela. Previously it had sourced its crude feedstock from a number of other countries including Libya. At a capacity of about as of 2010 it was in the top 10 largest refineries in the world.
Hess Oil Virgin Islands Corporation started refinery construction in January 1966 having purchased the property from Annie de Chabert and, in October of the same year, the refinery started operating. In 1974, the capacity of refinery was expanded up to its peak at . Hovensa LLC, which took over the refinery operatorship, was established in 1998.
In January 2011, Hovensa paid a $5.3 million penalty for Clean Air Act violations. The company closed the refinery in 2012, operating the property continued as a storage terminal only until that closed in 2015. A purchase proposal by Atlantic Basin Refining was vetoed by the USVI Senate, but in November 2015 a joint venture (of ArcLight Capital Partners and Freepoint Commodities) called Limetree Bay Terminals succeeded in purchasing the Refinery.
On November 30, 2018 Limetree Bay announced it had closed on $1.25 billion dollars of financing for the refinery to partially reopen by the end of 2019.