BEULAH - Owners of the nation's only synthetic fuels plant are now looking to Wednesday for production of synthetic natural gas to start up again.

That's two weeks later than Dakota Gasification Co. near Beulah planned to be back in the gas production business after completely shutting down the plant May 30 for the first time in its 20-year history.

Unanticipated repairs to vessels in the plant's phenol process area caused the expensive delay.

In the meantime, other parts of the process have been brought back on line, and raw gas can be made when the phenol process area checks out.

Plant spokesman Floyd Robb said plant operators are anticipating normal operations by mid-week, with raw gas production Wednesday and gas in the delivery pipeline Thursday.

"There'll be a huge sigh of relief, and then we'll go back to work," Robb said.

DGC spent $24 million on maintenance work to the plant, bringing in hundreds of contract workers, most of whom have since left.

Each day of no gas costs about $700,000.

Robb said plant operators learned new information about process areas during the black plant.

He said it wouldn't be another 20 years before the plant is brought down completely for maintenance. Information from this procedure will be used to evaluate the timing of the next total maintenance outage, he said.

Originally, the plant was to restart July 1, when workers found weakened welds in one of the largest phenol vessels.

Then, the plan was to be back on line over the weekend, but welding the repaired vessel involved lengthy stress testing that took additional time.