FCCU at PDVSA's El Palito Refinery Remains Offline After Power Outage

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), Venezuela's state-owned oil company, has been unable to restart the 70,000-barrel-per-day (BBL/d) fluid catalytic cracking unit (FCCU) after the entire 140,000 BBL/d El Palito refinery was affected by a power outage on July 15, 2010.

After an unplanned event at a third-party power plant that provides power to the refinery, all of the processing units were forced to shut down. The 140,000-BBL/d crude distillation and 71,000-BBL/d vacuum units were kept in hot-oil circulation on July 17, and restarted 24 hours later. Both of them are still online. Although expectations were to resume normal operations by the end of this week, unexpected problems at the FCCU's steam generator have forced the unit to remain offline, and related units will stay offline as well. Repair work is being performed; the FCCU is likely to be restarted in approximately three weeks.

By the time the power outage occurred, all of the processing units were online except for the Oxygenate, which is in the Conversion and Treatment area, which was set to be restarted on July 24, 2010. Separately, a planned 25-day turnaround at the BTX unit, which is in the Distillation and Specialities area, is to be performed in September this year. No other repair work has been scheduled for 2010.

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