The plant West Bountiful
A refinery named for Woods Cross that sits on West Bountiful's western edge
The refinery in the wrong city, and the street that runs through it
West Bountiful is the flat town on the valley floor, and its industrial western edge holds the Woods Cross Refinery, a plant that HF Sinclair itself lists in West Bountiful. It runs about 45,000 barrels a day, much of it a waxy Uinta Basin crude most refineries cannot handle, and one of the city's only two north to south streets crosses the plant's property. Here is whose it is, why it carries the wrong city's name, and what living near it actually means.
By Scott Buehler, Moving Utah
Updated October 2026
The short answer
The plant on West Bountiful's western edge is the Woods Cross Refinery, and it sits in West Bountiful, not Woods Cross. HF Sinclair, the company that runs it, lists it in West Bountiful even on a page headed Woods Cross, because the plant was named in the 1930s, years before West Bountiful became a city. The smaller refinery that is genuinely inside Woods Cross is a separate plant called Silver Eagle. For a buyer the practical facts are plain: it runs about 45,000 barrels a day, it is a permitted and regulated site with a public compliance record, one of the city's only two north to south streets crosses its property, and the honest homework is to measure the distance from the exact parcel and drive it in more than one season.
Buying or selling in West Bountiful?
The name
Whose refinery is it, and why does it carry the wrong city's name?
The plant belongs to West Bountiful, and the company that runs it says so. HF Sinclair lists the Woods Cross Refinery in West Bountiful, Utah, even where the page carrying that line is headed Woods Cross. The name is simply older than the boundary. A refinery has stood on this ground since the early 1930s, and West Bountiful did not incorporate as a city until 1948, so when the plant was named there was no West Bountiful to name it for. The refinery that actually sits inside Woods Cross is a separate, much smaller plant called Silver Eagle.
West Bountiful is the flat one among the south Davis towns. Bountiful climbs the bench to the east; West Bountiful stays down on the valley floor, a compact grid of a bit over three square miles between the freeway and the Legacy Parkway. The refinery sits on its western edge, where the residential streets give way to tanks, rail and the plant fence. From most of the city you do not see it. From the streets nearest it you do, and the plant flares, which is visible and sometimes audible from the roads around it.
Three things are worth knowing before anything else. There is no public access and no tour, so anything you learn on the ground is a drive by on ordinary streets. The plant sits inside a residential city, which is unusual, and the city has written plainly about living beside it. And the record is public: air complaints in this county route to the Davis County Health Department and the Utah Division of Air Quality, both of which keep files anyone can read.
Ninety years
Five owners, a thousand barrels grown to forty five thousand, and a crude almost nobody else can run
The plant is older than the city, and it has changed its name far more often than its footprint. It began as a small refinery in the early 1930s, was known for years as the Wasatch Oil Refining Company, and passed to Phillips Petroleum in the 1940s, which ran it for roughly six decades. Holly Corporation bought it in 2003, Holly merged with Frontier in 2011 to form HollyFrontier, and HollyFrontier became HF Sinclair in 2022 after buying Sinclair Oil. Five names in ninety years, on the same ground: Wasatch Oil, Phillips, Holly, HollyFrontier, HF Sinclair.
It grew as it aged. The plant is reported to have started at about a thousand barrels a day and to have been running roughly 31,000 by 2010. The 45,000 barrels a day it runs today came from an expansion finished in early 2015. The interesting part is what that expansion was for: a long term agreement to take black and yellow wax crude from the Uinta Basin. Waxy Utah crude is close to solid at room temperature and has to be kept hot to move at all, and most refineries in the country cannot process it. HF Sinclair calls the site a high conversion refinery with access to regional sweet and waxy crude oils plus pipeline access to Canadian crude, and it sends its fuel mainly to Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming and eastern Washington.
Seeing it from the street
From City Hall, take 800 West south. The residential grid gives way to industrial ground and the street reaches the plant's property. To take in the scale of the site rather than the fence line, run 500 South west from the freeway, turn north on 1100 West, and come back up the far side. There is no visitor parking and nothing to look at from close range, so treat it as orientation, not a visit, and drive it in more than one wind direction: a still January morning and a breezy July evening are different places on the same block.
The street
One of two north to south routes runs straight through the plant, and the city says so in writing
The single most consequential fact about West Bountiful is a street. West of the freeway the city has exactly two north to south routes, and one of them runs straight through the refinery. West Bountiful's own General Plan puts it plainly: the refinery's property straddles 800 West, and 800 West travels directly through the refinery. The same passage calls the plant typically a good neighbor and says residents do not experience many negative impacts, and in the same breath notes that a public street running through an operating refinery carries health, safety and security risks. Both halves are the city speaking about its own ground.
The plan even shows its work on a problem it has not solved. Closing that stretch of 800 West would help with safety, but residents would need another north to south route first, and there are only two. The city's preferred fix is to bend 800 West around the refinery and tie it into 700 West in Woods Cross. That would need another crossing of the Union Pacific tracks, and the railroad is unlikely to agree to a level crossing, so a bridge would probably be required, with no obvious source for the money.
There is a precedent for the city losing a street to someone else's infrastructure. To build the FrontRunner commuter line, 800 West was closed between the two cities, breaking the direct link to Woods Cross. So West Bountiful has already had one of its two through streets severed for a railway it has no platform on, and the other one runs through a refinery. For a compact city on the valley floor, that is not a detail. It is the transport map.
It also shapes what the city can build. West Bountiful holds the northern part of the Woods Cross FrontRunner station area, but most of that ground is the refinery. So when the city looks at what its half of the station could become, it looks at the thin band of commercial and residential land between the plant and the freeway, not at the plant itself, and the neighboring city has said the same about the ground beside it.
The record
What the public compliance record actually says, and what it does not
Every buyer within a mile of the plant should be able to read the record in a few minutes, because it is public and it is short. There are two federal Clean Air Act settlements on file, one in 2008 and one in 2015. The 2008 settlement required the company to install pollution controls, pay a civil penalty, and fund emergency equipment for the local fire services that would respond to an incident at the plant. The 2015 case concerned the vapor pressure of gasoline across three of the company's refineries, carried a penalty, and the company reported the violations itself. A settlement resolves allegations without a finding of liability, and neither one describes how the plant runs today.
The 2008 settlement's obligations still stand. The controls and limits it imposed remain binding, which is a continuing requirement rather than an open violation. In late 2023, when the state drafted the renewal of the plant's operating permit, the federal environmental agency asked the state to redo the paperwork and give the public a cleaner document to comment on. That was an objection to how the draft was written, not a finding that the plant had exceeded a limit.
What that adds up to for a household nearby is neither alarm nor reassurance. It is a permitted, regulated industrial site with a public compliance history, a company that has been fined and has fixed things, and a set of records you can pull yourself at the state and federal agencies. The plant does flare, and no one publishes a routine flare or alarm test schedule, so anyone who tells you which day the sirens are tested is guessing.
The real air quality question here is winter, not the plant on a normal day. Northern Utah's valley floor traps cold air under warm air for days at a time, and those inversions push fine particulate levels up across the whole Wasatch Front, valley wide, not at one address. West Bountiful sits on that floor. If air quality matters to you, read the season itself on the valley in winter page, and measure any specific parcel's distance from the plant rather than eyeballing it from a map.
Named for elsewhere
A landfill named for Bountiful and a sewage plant named for South Davis, both inside the same city
The refinery is the loud one, but it is not the only regional thing wearing another town's name inside West Bountiful. The Bountiful Sanitary Landfill sits on the city's northwest edge, where West Bountiful gives way to unincorporated county ground. It is owned by Bountiful City and holds a state air operating permit, because federal rules require large landfills to be permitted for their air emissions. For a household here the practical part is small: general disposal there is a Bountiful service funded by Bountiful residents, but clean green waste is accepted from West Bountiful residents along with several neighboring cities, with proof of residency. So your household trash cannot go to the tip at the end of the street, but your yard waste can. Hours and rules change with the season, so check with Bountiful City before loading a trailer.
The third regional facility is the quietest. The South Davis Sewer District treats at its north plant on the west end of 1200 North inside West Bountiful, and it reports enough capacity for the city to fully build out within its current boundaries. The district also owns land here that it does not need for treatment, and the city's parks plan has floated cooperating with it on recreation, soccer fields included. In a flat city that says it is short of dedicated soccer fields, a utility with spare ground is a live story rather than a footnote.
A refinery named for the town to the south, a landfill named for the town to the east, and a treatment plant named for the whole south end of the county. Three regional facilities inside a city of a bit over three square miles, and not one of them carries the name of the city it stands in.
Living near it
The homework is a parcel level exercise, and the documents are all public
This page will not tell you whether a street is a good place to live, and it will not describe the people on it. What it can do is hand you the homework a careful buyer would spend a week assembling. Start with distance, measured from the actual parcel rather than guessed from a map, because at this scale a mile is farther than it looks. Then wind, which on the valley floor makes a still January morning and a breezy July evening two different places on the same block. Then time of day: drive the parcel early, late, and once in winter. Then the documents: the plant's permit file at the Utah Division of Air Quality, the two federal settlements at the Environmental Protection Agency, and the city's own General Plan, which tells you what West Bountiful itself thinks about the arrangement.
Write down who to call before you need them. Davis County Health Department is the nearer local route for an odor or a smoke complaint, and the Utah Division of Air Quality holds the plant's permit and its compliance record. Neither is a customer service line for a neighbor dispute, and both keep public files worth more than any summary of them. The zoning and setbacks around the plant, and what the city may and may not approve next to it, live in the municipal code, which is the primary source on all of it.
None of this decides the question for you, and it is not meant to. It is meant to make the decision an informed one, which on this side of the freeway means reading a couple of public files and driving the ground yourself. The rest of what a West Bountiful address asks of a household, its services, its schools, and what it costs to run, is on the page on choosing between West Bountiful and Bountiful.
Quick answers
The plant, answered
West Bountiful. The plant is named the Woods Cross Refinery, but it sits inside West Bountiful, and HF Sinclair lists it in West Bountiful even on a page headed Woods Cross. The name is simply older than the boundary. The refinery that is actually inside Woods Cross is a separate, much smaller plant called Silver Eagle.
Because the plant was named before West Bountiful existed. A refinery has stood on this ground since the early 1930s, and West Bountiful did not incorporate as a city until 1948. When the plant got its name there was no West Bountiful to name it for, and the name stuck through five owners over ninety years.
HF Sinclair, the latest in a long line of owners. The plant began as the Wasatch Oil Refining Company in the 1930s, went to Phillips Petroleum in the 1940s, then to Holly Corporation in 2003, became part of HollyFrontier in 2011, and took the HF Sinclair name in 2022 after HollyFrontier bought Sinclair Oil.
It runs about 45,000 barrels of crude a day, a size it reached with an expansion finished in 2015. Much of what it runs is a waxy crude from Utah's Uinta Basin that is close to solid at room temperature and has to be kept hot to move, a feedstock most refineries in the country cannot handle. HF Sinclair calls the site a high conversion refinery.
Yes, and West Bountiful says so in its own General Plan. The plan states that the refinery's property straddles 800 West and that 800 West travels directly through the refinery, one of only two north to south routes the city has west of the freeway. The plan calls the plant typically a good neighbor while noting that a public street through an operating refinery carries safety risks.
It is a permitted, regulated industrial site with a public compliance record, and this page will not tell you a street is good or bad to live on. The honest approach is to measure the distance from the specific parcel you are considering, drive it in more than one season and wind direction, and read the plant's permit file. The bigger air quality question in this valley is winter inversion, which affects the whole Wasatch Front rather than one address.
Davis County Health Department and the Utah Division of Air Quality. The county health department is the nearer local route for an odor or smoke complaint, and the state division holds the plant's permit and its compliance record. Both keep public files. The plant does flare, and no one publishes a routine flare or alarm test schedule, so anyone telling you which day the sirens are tested is guessing.
There are two federal Clean Air Act settlements on record, one in 2008 and one in 2015. The 2008 settlement required pollution controls, a penalty, and money for local emergency equipment, and its obligations still stand. The 2015 case was about gasoline vapor pressure and the company reported the violations itself. A settlement resolves allegations without a finding of liability, and neither describes how the plant runs today.
Two more regional facilities, both named for somewhere else. The Bountiful Sanitary Landfill sits on the city's northwest edge and is owned by Bountiful City, and the South Davis Sewer District treats sewage for the south end of the county at a plant inside West Bountiful. So a small residential city holds a refinery, a landfill and a regional treatment plant, and not one of the three carries its name.
A public file, a documented plant, and a parcel you should drive yourself
The useful version of this subject is neither the alarmed one nor the reassuring one. It is a short list: measure the distance from the actual parcel, learn what the wind does in January, read the city's own General Plan passage about the street, pull the permit file at the state and the two settlements at the federal agency, and check the zoning in the municipal code before you decide anything. That is an afternoon of work, and it beats every summary of it, including this one. Tell me what you are weighing and I will connect you with a Davis County partner agent who works this side of the freeway, and stay on the file for the financing side.
Or call Scott: (435) 357-4345or send Scott a message
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