Texas Natural Gas Co. came to Upton County, Texas in 1950. They selected a site to build a natural gas processing plant 17 miles northeast of Rankin. Men and equipment were brought to the site in unprecedented numbers.
The design of the Plant was raised in seven different stages, starting with the machine room. The engine room floor and side wall were poured with mostly hand-mixed cement. The engine pedestals were then poured and made ready to receive the engines. Most of the engines were 9 – 880 HP Clark engines with 1 – 660HP and 1 440HP. The engines arrived disassembled, the bed section was put in first and grouted in place. The crankshaft was then added along with the block and cylinders. The connecting rods and piston heads were then fitted to complete the process.
The compressor cylinders were then added to the rear of the engine. Not all engines had the same type of compressor. 4 types of compressors were installed, low stage, second stage, high stage and propane compressors. The pressure in these cylinders ranged from 35 pounds inlet on the low stages to 800 pounds discharge in the high stage.
While crews worked in the engine room, other crews were placing forms to pour the bases of the towers to be erected. The first tower the gas entered was the absorber, the gas entered at the bottom and exited at the top, as it traveled to the top of the tower, lean oil or crude naphtha n. #2 flowed down and took all the heavy ends out of the gas, what was left was methane gas, which is what we burn in our homes.
Then the gas went to the deethanizer, the same process was followed as for the absorber, this time the ethane was removed and the rest of the heavy materials went to the next tower.
The heavy ones then went to the depropanizer where the propane was removed and then went to the debutanizer where the raw gasoline came out the bottom and the butane and isobutane came out the top.
The methane and ethane were placed in different pipelines and sent to various locations. The propane, butane, isobutane and gsaolene were placed in tanks and then loaded onto trucks and removed.
Hot oil heaters were placed on the west side of the plant as far from the towers as possible. The heaters warmed up the heat to be pumped back into the towers in an endless cycle.
The generator room had 4 generators. There were three Coopers and an Ingersol Rand to power the generators. These were the heart of the plant, when one went offline it usually meant the plant was going down and there was a lot of work ahead for everyone.
The cooling tower was 50 feet high and 300 feet long and had 5 large fans to cool the water. The hot gases were pumped through coils to cool them down and return them to the liquid stage.
There were 4 boilers at the plant to serve as a heat source during the winter to prevent pipes from freezing and heat some of the water and products prior to shipment.
The train rack was on the east side of the plant. The train rack can accommodate 1 small tank car and 8 jumbo cars. Regular railcars held around 13,000 gallons of butane or propane, while jumbo railcars held 30,000 gallons. At one time the plant shipped over 300,000 gallons of propane per day from the Benedum plant.
There were 5 storage pits on the site that were used to store propane underground. These wells were the first in the world to store products in this way. The wells had a combined capacity of 65 million gallons. There was a time when there was no demand for propane.
And there was over 300,000 gallons of propane a day being burned through the flare at the plant, the flare could be seen for miles away.
The company built housing for the men and their families who worked there. The majority were 2-bedroom homes with a garage and 6 3-bedroom homes. In total, 24 houses were built on the site. A local Rankin contractor was awarded the contract to build them. In 1967 the company sold the houses to the employees who lived in the houses for $250.00. Employees had to purchase a lot at the location of their choice and pay to move it to their new location. Sixteen of the families moved their homes to Rankin, 8 went to Big Lake.
Families quickly got involved in their communities and ended up making a difference. Some became firefighters, city council members, school board members, mayors, hospital board members, and Lions Club members.
The Benedum Plant is still in operation but it is owned by another company, it no longer has the hot oil system but a Cryo system that uses cold instead of heat and a turbine that rotates at 85,000 RPM to separate the product. It’s a skeleton of what it used to be, but it still stands proud.
