Enap's Aconcagua Refinery Preparing for Start-Up of New Sulfur Recovery Unit

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Sulfur Recovery Unit (SRU) 1 at Enap's Concon Aconcagua refinery in Chile remains offline because of further equipment failure, and plant authorities are preparing for the start-up of a third SRU, which Foster Wheeler Iberia SA (NASDAQ:FWLT) (Spain) engineered and constructed as part of the delayed coker addition project.

Enap, Chile's state-owned oil company, has three refineries in the country: Aconcagua, Bio Bio and Gregorio. The Aconcagua, which began operation in 1955, has a total production capacity of 18,000 cubic meters per day.

The broken C1005 exchanger needs to be changed in SRU 1, and workers are performing maintenance on new refractory problems that is expected to last three to four more weeks. Because the plant's processing of heavy diesel fuel creates high sulfur content, authorities need to have two SRUs online. SRU 2 is online and operating at full capacity and SRU 3 is expected to start up by April 15, 2008.

Hydrocracker 2, is currently de-rated because the blending of diesel fuel and reduced crude oil from Magallanes (Chile) has too much carbon in it. The naphtha hydrotreater is processing at full capacity. Planned maintenance turnarounds in the visbreaker are carried out every three to four months for decoking work, but a deep decoking process was not performed during the unit's last turnaround in February 2008. If the unit continues to produce too much coke, it will have to be shut down in June and then again in October.

In October, all of the units will be shut down for a 30-daymaintenance shutdown except for the fuel oil, naphtha and diesel fuel hydrotreaters, hydrocracking 1 and 2, topping and vacuum 2. CCR will be shut down for only one week because there will be no possibility to prepare the necessary blending to produce gasoline. Minor repairs will be performed in the unit.

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