EP Petroecuador Postpones Maintenance at Esmeraldas Refinery

Español

Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--State-owned company EP Petroecuador (Quito, Ecuador), the owner and operator of the 110,000-barrel-per-day (BBL/d) Esmeraldas refinery, which is located in the northeast region of Ecuador, announced that it has postponed a maintenance turnaround and modernization program for the facility in 2012-13.

According to company sources, the main turnaround planned for the current year on the 18,000-BBL/d fluid catalytic cracking unit (FCCU), which had been scheduled to begin in October 2012, has been delayed and will begin in September 2013. The unit will be offline for about 284 days in order to complete the revamp project, which will increase the processing capacity up to 28,000 BBL/d.

SK E&C (Seoul, South Korea) was granted the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for the modernization. UOP (Des Plaines, Illinoise) will provide the reactor and regenerator technology for the FCCU.

The delay for the maintenance plan for the FCCU unit will delay those for the remaining processing units by about a year. For instance, the beginning of the turnaround on the Crude 1 unit, which is to be expanded from 55,000 BBL/d to 65,000 BBL/d, will begin in September 2013 instead of December 2012. The shutdown on the Crude 2 unit to increase the 55,000 BBL/d capacity to 65,000 BBL/d, was set to begin in July 2013, but was deferred to April 2014.

EP Petroecuador said that the reason for the delays was that the company needed more fuel for the major turnarounds.

Because of the delays, the company has decided to perform minor contingency turnarounds to extend the units' and equipments' useful lives until they can reach the right conditions for modernization and major maintenance. The contingency work will be performed in January 2013 for 35 days in the FCCU and 23 days for the Crude 1, Vacuum 1 and Visbreaker 1, and 15 days in February for the Crude 2, Vacuum and Visbreaker 2.

Industrial Info Resources (IIR), with global headquarters in Sugar Land, Texas, and eight offices outside of North America, is the leading provider of global market intelligence specializing in the industrial process, heavy manufacturing and energy markets. Industrial Info's quality-assurance philosophy, the Living Forward Reporting Principle™, provides up-to-the-minute intelligence on what's happening now, while constantly keeping track of future opportunities.