Unplanned Overhaul at La Teja Refinery in Uruguay

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas) -- All the units at Uruguay’s Ancap La Teja Refinery had to be shut down on August 22, 2007, due to an incident in the Topping unit, which brought about the emergency shutdown of the rest of the refinery.

La Teja Refinery, which is located in Montevideo, Uruguay, normally has a daily processing capacity of 50,000 barrels of light crude. In July 2006, Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, together with its Uruguayan counterpart Ancap, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) towards a 20% expansion of La Teja Refinery’s current production. This plant will process heavy crude oil from the Marlim Oil Field (Campos Basin, Brazil) to produce diesel fuel for Uruguay’s domestic market and at the same time provide exports to Argentina. La Teja Refinery’s deep conversion capacity will facilitate the supply of Venezuelan crude oil to the Uruguayan market. To view more on this, see related August 24, 2006 news article - PDVSA and Ancap to Expand La Teja Refinery in Uruguay

A leakage in the topping unit at Ancap’s refinery brought about an unexpected fire in crude distillation and as a consequence of this, the wiring system between the unit and the switchboard shorted. The rest of the processing units: Reformer (CCR), Merox 1, Visbreaker, Isomerization, Reformer, Hydrotreater Naphtha, FCCU and Vacuum. According to the Refinery’s Reforming Area Maintenance Foreman, maintenance work is already being carried out to solve the damages; however, all the units will remain offline until September 2, 2007. The Crude Distillation unit will be started up on September 2, 2007, and the day after that the Cracking unit will start up. All processing units at La Teja refinery are to be producing at normal rates by August 6, 2007.

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