US Virgin Islands Governor Albert Bryan has asked the Trump administration to designate the idle refinery on St. Croix as a national asset and to build a federal pathway that could return the plant to operation.

Bryan's appeal, reported by The Virgin Islands Consortium, frames the shut refinery as more than a territorial economic file. He argues the facility carries strategic weight for US fuel supply and that Washington, not the territory alone, should shoulder the effort to restart it.

The refinery at the center of the request is the St. Croix plant formerly operated as Limetree Bay. It has produced no refined products since its last failed restart attempt, which ended after the facility shut down amid environmental violations and federal regulatory intervention. The US Environmental Protection Agency ordered an operations suspension at the site in 2021 after episodes that included flare incidents and community complaints about oil mist affecting nearby neighborhoods on St. Croix.

That regulatory history is the obstacle Bryan wants the federal government to address. The governor is asking the administration to create what he describes as a federal path to restart — in practical terms, a route through the permitting and compliance questions that have kept the plant offline since the EPA order.

The economic stakes for the territory are direct. The St. Croix refinery was historically among the largest private employers in the US Virgin Islands, and its workforce and local contractor base contracted sharply when operations ceased. Bryan's office has repeatedly identified a restart as the single most consequential economic development item on the territory's agenda.

The strategic argument the governor advances tracks a broader policy conversation in Washington about domestic refining capacity. US Atlantic Basin refining has contracted over the past decade, with multiple closures along the East Coast and in the Caribbean basin removing supply that once served markets from the US Northeast to the region's island economies. Advocates of restart proposals have argued shuttered capacity matters for fuel security; critics and market analysts counter that structural demand for refined products and prevailing crack spreads, not regulatory barriers alone, determine whether such plants can run profitably. That debate remains unresolved.

Bryan's approach also reflects the financial reality on St. Croix. The territorial government lacks the resources to drive a restart on its own, and prior private-sector attempts to relaunch the refinery stumbled on capital, operational, and environmental grounds before achieving sustained production. A federal designation as a national asset could open access to government support mechanisms and give regulators a mandate to work through the plant's compliance file.

No timeline accompanied the governor's request, and the administration has not publicly responded. Any restart would still require resolution of the environmental orders that halted operations, renewed operational testing, and an ownership or operator structure capable of funding the work.

The watch items now are three: whether the Trump administration formally takes up the national-asset designation; what the EPA does with the compliance conditions attached to the St. Croix site; and whether any operator emerges with the balance sheet to finance a restart at a plant whose recent operating history ended in shutdown within months of relaunch.