Two longtime oilmen hope to make the central-eastern Utah town of Green River, Emery County, known for more than watermelons.

Texan Devere Bigelow and Wayne Heftye, Santa Fe, N.M., have purchased an idle oil refinery just off I-70 that they plan to fire up in the next three months. They call their company EcoDomaine Refining Inc.

The one-time used-oil processing plant will initially be equipped to process about 3,000 barrels of oil a day and eventually 18,000 a day, including black wax crude from the Uinta Basin, Heftye said. EcoDomaine intends to make mostly gasoline and diesel.

"We'll soak up all the black wax available to us," said Heftye, who has managed three oil refineries in his 39-year career. "We're basically the sponge in the area."

EcoDomaine has gone about its business quietly since agreeing to buy the plant from Coyote Oil 18 months ago. It paid $500,000, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents.

State government officials were unaware of the company until fielding questions from reporters this week.

Rusty Ruby, a manager at the Utah Division of Air Quality, said depending on the amount of pollutants emitted, an air-quality permit could take years to obtain.

"There hasn't been a new refinery permitted in over 30 years in the nation," Ruby said. "It's not even really a refinery. It processes used oil."

No permit application by the company has been submitted to the Division of Air Quality, Ruby said.

"I don't even have enough data to even know how big they would be," Ruby said. "For one thing, we don't have any history on how to even permit these. We would have a lot of questions to ask ourselves.

"I would think that the major part of it would be them gathering the information, if they even get to us. I would think that would take longer than it would take us to process it."

Ruby said the plant could be retrofitted to process crude oil but that it would likely be a complex process that would include adding new pollution-control equipment.

The plant will be the "cleanest operation internationally," Heftye said.

"We've done excellent work from an environmental standpoint," he said. "I don't think we're going to have any issues."

Heftye said he understands the company can operate under an existing permit on the site.

Oil-exploration companies in eastern Utah have shut down wells the past year because the five Salt Lake area refineries have shunned their product for cheaper crude from Canada.

EcoDomaine says the Green River plant will be able to handle all the black wax the basin can deliver. "We're strictly (here) to handle the producers who have been disadvantaged," Heftye said, adding the company expects to process up to 12,000 barrels of black wax by the end of 2007.