The Robert Trent Jones Junior-designed layout at Three Crowns Golf Club sits on the site of an old oil refinery and it’s a wonderful example of what land reclamation can achieve.
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The Robert Trent Jones Junior-designed layout at Three Crowns Golf Club sits on the site of an old oil refinery and it’s a wonderful example of what land reclamation can achieve.
Three Crowns
Three Crowns Golf Club resides on the Platte River Commons, an award-winning remediation property created for the purpose of transforming a former Amoco Oil Refinery site into a recreational area for the residents of Casper.
The Three Crowns name comes from BP Amoco’s old logo which was crowns of gold, white and red, representing the three different grades of gasoline sold by the company, and the course sits above land still contaminated with millions of gallons of refinery products which will continue to be recovered for years to come.
Designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr. at the start of the new millennium, the course features USGA-specification bentgrass greens, with bluegrass tees, fairways and rough. Water comes into play on fourteen holes as they weave around eight lakes, four of which are used to overcome water pollution.
From the Robert Trent Jones II website:
“Our biggest challenge in designing the golf course was adjusting to the requirement that cuts could not be made deeper than six feet. In preparing the site, our development partners removed three thousand miles of pipe and 400,000 cubic yards of concrete, and then capped contaminated soil with six feet of clean dirt.
Using high-tech maps that identified places where the soil was uncontaminated to lower depths, we dug lakes (which we lined with geotechnical fibre to protect them from contamination) and used the excavated dirt to build mounds and other course features.
We also met the challenge of creating a series of raised wetlands that sit above the golf course and help purify water on the site. An intricate system of pumps, oil separators, monitoring and recovery wells is integrated to treat and test all water, ensuring it meets environmental standards before it is returned to the Platte River, which runs beside the course.
At RTJ II, we have always designed golf courses that are good for the environment. At Three Crowns Golf Club, we enjoyed an unusual opportunity to convert a degraded brownfield into an aesthetically pleasing landscape that supports the Royal and Ancient game.”