Latest / The Jeff Crilley Show / John Calce, CEO, America First Refining | The Jeff Crilley Show
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- Coming up next on the Jeff Crilley Show, you're gonna meet the great John Calce. He is the CEO and founder of America First Refining, and they are set to build the first new oil refinery in The US in more than fifty years. His incredible journey just ahead. Many are predicting that the worst is yet to come, which is unfortunate, said one person here. Until now, they've enjoyed the reputation of being the nation's icebox. Watched a burglar in his home this morning by webcam. As a journalist of over twenty five years, stories are what make my world turn. Reporting live from The Dallas Newsroom tonight, Jeff Crilley, Fox four news. But in 2008, I took the jump from my familiar life and started a PR firm from my home. We're talking about anyone with a camcorder like the one I'm using becomes a television network. We started slowly growing the company and we now have over a 100 clients and we've branched into the world of live digital broadcasting. I now own eight different TV studios and have a huge team. And the stories that I now get to share are sometimes the most important of my life. Life has a funny way of coming around full circle. This is The Jeff Crilley Show. Well, it's almost unbelievable that the last time we built an oil refinery in The US was in the early seventies. John Calce is out to change that narrative. He is the CEO and founder of America First Refining, and he has just gotten the permits to build the first oil refinery in fifty two years in The US. John, thanks for coming on the show. Jeff, thanks so much. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Well, a lot of people would be watching this saying, why has it taken so long? Why why has it taken so long? Well, turns out it's hard. As I learned as I learned the hard way. But also, the energy space in The US is pretty dynamic. And if you think about production of oil in The United States domestically, we kinda had given up on it. We kinda got to the point where we thought we found all the oil in The US, and we were relying primarily on Gulf Coast oil, offshore oil, foreign oil, and all of our refineries were tuned to process that oil. It wasn't until the advent of the shale revolution, starting here in in the Barnett Shale in the in Dallas Fort Worth area, with natural gas, and then morphing into the ability to extract oil from the shales in the early two thousand teens that The US domestically saw production grow. Today, sit at 13 or 14,000,000 barrels of oil per day, but it wasn't that long ago that we were at one or 2,000,000 barrels a day. Yes. So the the market has dramatically changed and with it comes opportunity. Yes. We're gonna pull up your website and as we scroll down the website let's talk about this Odyssey that you've been on. It's taking you seven years to get the financing and everything together? Almost actually twelve. It took me seven years to get the thing permitted. Okay. So I started off in 2015 with a couple partners and we believe that that we would have an overabundance of shale oil in The United States and we believe that we are under refined to handle it. And this at the time, The US was producing maybe 5,000,000 barrels or so a day, and we thought there was a lot more growth to come. So we started the permitting process in 2015, went down and met with the TCQ who've been terrific, met with the governor's office and and they said, John, this is great. It'll take you eighteen months to get a permit. Seven years later, we've got the permit. Wow. So for 2015 to '22, it took us to get through the permitting process. Well, you've been very busy media wise. I admire your PR firm because they've done a good job. You've done all the national shows. I heard about you first through KRLD's David Johnson. And then as I was doing my homework for the show, I found a great clip from KXAN in Austin. Let's go ahead and roll that. Large scale oil refinery in more than fifty years. President Donald Trump announced the Brownsville project yesterday on Truth Social. The refinery will be built by America's first refineries. As state capital correspondent Adam Schweger reports, this project has been years in the making. Well, it's it's been a journey. That's for sure. John Calce has been trying to build a refinery in South Texas for a dozen years as the Permian Basin started to dramatically increase their production of shale oil. I realized twelve years ago, we were gonna have an overabundance US shale oil and an underability to refine it. After a decade of working through the process, Calce says the last step was finding a commercial partner. For this project, India's Reliance Group stepped up with an investment into Calce's company, America First Refineries, as a minority partner with an agreement to purchase over 80% of the produced oil. University of Houston professor Ed Hurst says this investment made the project possible. Keep in mind that most refineries just process. They make pennies per gallon. They don't make dollars per gallon. On Wednesday morning, leaders from the Port Of Brownsville said the 3 to $4,000,000,000 project will create around 500 direct jobs, and it's just one of several investments coming to the port. Our economic development team has over $20,000,000,000 in in the pipeline of projects that are looking at the port process. According to the port, the project is expected to break ground sometime in April. Calce hopes to have the refinery operational in a couple years. In 2028, we should have all of our large units on the ground and being assembled in Brownsville with our first full year of operations in 2029. In Austin, I'm Adam Schwager. John, congratulations on your stick to itiveness because not many people would have plugged away for twelve years. You were explaining before the show that there is light crude and heavy crude and it's different. Yeah. When I started this process, I had no idea. So I had to learn a lot of this, got some great people around me, and was fortunate to learn quite a bit. And different types of oil you process differently. They're all oil, but they have different component parts. They have different temperatures they like to work at. And so I like to explain to people the simplest way to think about this is a refinery is like a big oven. You're cooking oil for lack of a better description. And an oven is an oven. And part of the challenge people ask is why can't the other refineries just change? And it's they're big complex machines. But when you think of a refinery as an oven, think that when you're setting up the refinery, you set it up at one temperature. So if you have a pizza oven, you're gonna set it up at a thousand degrees to make pizzas. And that's great for pizza dough. Think of that as heavy oil or traditional oil. If you want to make cookies, can take the same oven, but you set it up at 325 degrees, and that's great at cooking cookies. But if you want to bake a cookie and you put it in a pizza oven, it burns up. If you put a pizza dough in a cookie oven, you never get pizza. Yeah. The oil refinery works the same way. So we recognize that all the way back in 2015 and realize we needed to build an oven specific for shale oil. Yes. That's what we permitted, that's what we designed. But do you see I mean, there has to be a first and and you're the first in fifty two years. Do you see others following you? Okay. As an American, as someone that loves the oil business and someone that believes that we need more refining capacity, not just for The United States, but also for the Western Hemisphere and the world at large. Remember, we export a lot of refined product into Mexico, into Latin America, even now into Europe and Australia. So there's additional demand for American energy products around the world. I absolutely think there's more space for more refiners. Today, we export about 5,000,000 barrels a day. I'm gonna tell you a fact that's unbelievable. A lot of that oil goes from The US Gulf Coast over to Asia because they had built refineries in Asia. So Korea, China, etcetera. They refined US oil into gasoline and then guess where they ship that gasoline back to? Back to us. Back to California. Oh gosh. California imports 70% of their gasoline. So yes, The US has more need for refining. We believe that octane, which is one of the how you increase the I call the boom factor right of gasoline is in demand. So there's more demand for that. So I think writ large, yes. We need more refineries and we should be exporting less of our oil. We should be processing more of it here at home. Let's export high quality, high priced refined products. Yeah. And as we're taping this, we're in a global crisis because of the Strait Of Hormuz. Can we drill baby drill? Do we need more refineries to just open up the spigots? Yeah. I think you're gonna see, in addition to the tankers that are lining up on the Gulf Coast, we need not just more refiners, we need more export capacity. Right? Loading a VLCC, the very large crude carrier, which is a 2,000,000 barrel vessel Mhmm. You need a pretty deep water to do it. The Trump or the Trump administration along, I think, with a Japanese investment fund are gonna build another offshore loading facility off the Port Of Corpus Christi. There's currently one in Louisiana. So I think you need not only more refineries, but you need more capacity to export US crude oil. Because I think a lot of these developing nations, especially in Latin America, they've got the need for more energy, and so they could refine there as well. And sometimes it takes a little bit of pain in order for the country to shift its view. Do you think there is a shifting view on Drill Baby Drill and whether or not we need to remain hostage to the Middle East? No. I absolutely think The US is, and the world honestly, is seeing that. You know, I get a lot of questions about what about EVs and electric cars and and look at there's a space for all of that. Right? Part of the challenge is for for an EV, you've got to make electricity from somewhere. Yes. And most of that comes from natural gas. Now, will nuclear be an answer? Probably. Right? And we need that too. So I think it's drill baby drill, refine baby refine, but all the above is the strategy. The world needs more energy. We're growing. People that are developing nations, they want to have a car, want to cook, they want to have electricity all the time. The US is blessed to have an abundance of natural resources, so we should pursue an all the above strategy. And in doing so, we actually enhance our national security. So that's one of the big credits I think the Trump administration gets is an all the above path and and recognize that this is truly a national security issue because if you're out of gasoline, you can't turn the lights on, you can't put diesel in the truck to haul the goods around, we have a real problem. And how long before your refinery will be producing? Well, that's a great question. I wish it was tomorrow. It's only been twelve years so far, but we are we're going as fast as we can. We anticipate having all of our large units on the ground in Brownsville in 2028 with our first year of commercial operations in 2029. So about three three years from today. Alright John, we're almost out of time so look into the camera on the left and give some final thoughts. Well, just want say thank you, Jeff, to you and your team for having us on and let us tell our story. Thank you again to all the folks that I work with, whether it's the TCQ, the Governor's Office, the National NG Dominance Council, as well as my team that on our on the America First Refining team who work every day to make this happen. And we appreciate all the good words and support from the public. So thank you all for your for your time today and thank you for all the support. Absolutely. We're gonna end with his website which is americafirstrefining.com. The great John Calce. Thanks for coming on the show. That's it for now. We'll see you next time. Thank you.