Six Units at Cardon Refinery Still Down after December Outage

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Six of the 30 processing units at PDVSA's 295-barrel-per-day Cardon refinery, which is a part of the Paraguana Refining Center (Centro de Refinacion Paraguana), remains offline since the power outage on December 3, 2007. The Paraguana Refining Center is one of the largest refining centers in Falcon State, Venezuela. The outage was caused by a failure in Venezuela's interconnected power grid because of an overcharge in the T-31 substation. The units are expected to be restarted by the end of this month.

As soon as the power failure occurred, all of the units were halted to prevent damage to the plant. The start-up process began December 4, 2007. For more details, view related December 10, 2007, article - Power Outage Halts Activities at Cardon Refinery in Venezuela.

The fluid catalytic cracking unit (FCCU), which remained offline until December 18, 2007, because the unit's compressor was damaged during a previous restart attempt, is now running at normal rates; however, since Cardon's steam boilers were affected along with the catalytic cracking unit, alkylation, MTBE, TAME, SRU 1 and 2 and kerosene hydrotreatment remain offline. Cardon has six steam boilers capable of 80 tons to 90 tons of steam per hour, and in normal conditions, the plant functions with only five boilers. One is usually kept as a reserve. Maintenance work in the F101 boiler is to be finished by January 21, 2008. After it is back online, the current offline units will be restarted in sequence. The other boilers under maintenance are to be running again in no less than two months.

Three of the plant's five steam boilers are down; two of them stopped working after the power incident, and another one had stopped working before the outage to undergo a maintenance turnaround, which has not been finished. The three boilers are being repaired; pipes and security valves are being changed; and chemical cleaning is to be performed. For more details see December 19, 2007, article - Unit at Cardon Refinery Still Down after Early December Outage.

Even though the FCCU and alkylation 1 expansion is scheduled to start on January 15, 2008, officials have not given a green light. This could delay start-up until the end of the month. The project involves expanding the FCCU's 11,000-ton-per-day capacity to 12,800 tons per day, as well as expanding the 1,500-ton-per-day alkylation 1 to 2,400 tons per day. During the four-month expansion turnaround, LPG, flare, propane-propylene, diethanol amine) and salt water lines 4 and 5 will be shut down for 30 mechanical days; however, these units will remain offline until the FCCU and alkylation are online. As of January 8, 2007, the Cardon refinery was processing 282,000 barrels per day with 24 of its 30 processing units processing at normal rates.

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