Hilco to start building ‘Bellwether District’ on old PES refinery grounds in early 2023

Hilco Redevelopment Partners plans to start the first phase of construction in early 2023 for what the company has labeled the Bellwether District, which spans 1,300 acres on the site of the former Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery.

Justin Dunn, an HRP vice president, said during a community meeting Tuesday night that crews will begin preparing and grading land in the first quarter of 2023 and that “vertical” construction would begin in spring.

The property is still undergoing cleanup and monitoring from more than 100 years of petroleum operations that ended in 2019 with a fire and two explosions that forced the shuttering of what was the largest refinery on the East Coast.

HRP plans a new network of roads that would connect to existing city streets with easy access to I-76. It plans bike lanes, and is exploring links to SEPTA service, while opening public access to a part of the Schuylkill that’s been closed for more than a century.

Dunn said HRP’s first buildings will be two warehouses, one 326,000 square feet, and the other 700,000 square feet.

They would become part of the industrial section planned for the Bellwether District. HRP would start construction in 2024 for the second section, a life sciences campus.

In all, it will take a decade or more to build out the entire Bellwether District, company officials said. They anticipate about 19,000 people will eventually work in the district.

Dunn said crews will begin grading and excavating for the warehouses in January.

“These are not typical industrial-style kind of dirty buildings,” Dunn said. “These are very much clean space.”

Dunn expects the warehouses to be occupied by “big retail names, e-commerce, logistics” in a wedge of land between Passyunk Avenue and South 26th and Hartranft Streets.

“We would love to have some light manufacturing, which is not smokestack manufacturing … creating a campus that has a class A feeling.”

He said several new roads would be added with bike paths “to allow safe passage of pedestrian and bike access.”

George Needs, also a vice president, said crews will begin preparing land for the life sciences campus by mid-2023 with construction to start in early 2024. Access would be off South 28th Street and Maiden Lane.

The first buildings would range from 150,000 to 180,000 square feet and rise 30 to 40 feet high. They would be designed to manufacture and store pharmaceuticals and medical therapeutics.

HRP officials said the land would be graded to account for flooding, given the Bellwether District’s low-lying position next to the river.

Meanwhile, Julianna Connolly, who oversees environmental remediation for HRP, said cleanup of contamination resulting from the former petroleum operations is continuing. HRP, along with Philadelphia Energy Solutions, is responsible for contamination of any soil or groundwater that occurred after 2012. Sunoco, a prior owner of the refinery, is responsible for contamination before 2012.

Connolly said soil is being sampled before it is capped or moved as needed. She said the company is working on five areas of the site to bring them up to state standards under what’s known as Pennsylvania Act 2 law, which allows reuse of contaminated properties as long as they meet certain criteria.

» READ MORE: High levels of a toxic chemical were recorded as the former South Philly refinery got demolished

For example, crews pumped oil out of the ground in one section, she said, and the area is being monitored. The largest contaminated area spans eight acres and HRP is using a new technology known as oil vapor extraction, which involves converting the petroleum into vapor and collecting it.

“It involves more aggressively trying to remove the petroleum that’s in the subsurface of the ground,” Connolly said.

In other areas, crews are sampling soil where large oil storage tanks had been removed.

“We won’t be surprised if we find additional areas [to clean] as we continue through demolition and earth work,” Connolly said.