Alaska Refinery to Become Second in State to Produce ULSD, Despite Fire Last Year

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Petro Star Incorporated (Anchorage, Alaska), a subsidiary of Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (Anchorage), has nearly finished rebuilding the company's Valdez, Alaska, refinery, which has been offline for more than eight months after a fire ripped through the 15-year-old refinery during the evening hours of December 28. The flames, which reached up to 300 feet, took several hours to extinguish by the City of Valdez Pipeline Service Company (Anchorage), with assistance from the plant's crew. An average of 8,000 gallons of water was used to fight the fire that froze to the site, on top of the estimated 200 gallons of spilled crude. Leaving only a low degree of site contamination, the crude was said to have stayed contained within the perimeter dike.

More than 150 workers were involved in rebuilding the refinery, including another Petro Star subsidiary, ASRC Energy Services (Anchorage), which performed construction. After bottlenecks to the facility are eliminated, capacity will increase from 40,000 barrels per day (BBL/d) to 50,000 BBL/d, when the refinery restarts operations planned for October. In August, the new crude processing column was erected, standing 130 feet tall, weighing over 200,000 pounds with a diameter of 12 feet. This will allow for various products, such as jet fuel, diesel fuels and other distillates, to be produced along with the future production of ultra-low sulfur diesel that will be available around fall 2010, once installation of the new hydrotreater is complete. This will make Petro Star Valdez the second out of the four refineries in the state to produce ultra-low sulfur diesel. Currently, Tesoro Alaska Company (Kenai, Alaska), a subsidiary of Tesoro Petroleum Corporation (San Antonio, Texas) is the sole producer. The other two refineries in Alaska, which are both in the Geographic North Pole, include a second Petro Star location and a Flint Hills Resources LP (Wichita, Kansas) facility.

Petro Star Valdez has 22 employees and is looking to double staff once the rebuild and upgrades are complete. The original Petro Star location was built in the Geographic North Pole in 1985 and processes 17,500 BBL/d to serve the light-fuel needs of Alaska. The refinery draws North Slope crude oil from the nearby trans-Alaska oil pipeline that makes a variety of products consisting of jet fuel, marine diesel, home heating oil and turbine fuel.

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