Willemstad Isla Refinery's Cat Cracker Running at Maximum Rates after December Outage

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--The cat cracker at the Willemstad Isla refinery, which had to be shut down along with the rest of the processing units in early December after a power failure, was brought back online on December 27, 2007, and is currently running at maximum capacity. Four of the 34 units are still offline. The refinery is operated by Venezuela's state-owned oil company PDVSA in Curacao.

The cat cracker was first restarted on December 23, 2007; however, a problem in the air system brought about the shutdown of the unit on the following day. The alkylation unit, which was restarted on December 24, 2007, was kept online at minimum rates until the cat cracker reached normal rates. The alkylation unit is online and processing at normal rates. SRU 5 was restarted; however, SRU 1, 2 and 3 remain offline. The latter is in standby mode and is to be restarted according to feedstock programming. The rest of the plant’s processing units, except Thermal Cracker 1, which is offline because of feed stock programming, are online and running without inconveniences.

A power failure at the refinery brought about the complete shutdown of all the processing units for 24 hours. After the power outage, a problem emerged when trying to restart the cat cracker. For more details, see December 11, 2007, article - Several Units Remain Offline after Power Outage at PDVSA Refinery in Curacao or see PDVSA Restarts Cat Cracker at Willemstad Isla Refinery in Curacao after Early December Outage.

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