Colombian Refinery Experiences Unplanned Outage

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Ecopetrol S.A., Colombia's state-owned oil company and the fourth largest oil company in Latin America, experienced a power outage at the Cartagena refinery on October 5, 2007. The incident was caused by the short circuiting in a feeder of the cooler, which caused the Visbreaking unit to stop working. The unit could not be immediately restarted due to coking on the furnace.

A maintenance turnaround that had been scheduled for late November or early December of this year was moved forward and performed while the unit was offline. On October 24, 2007, the Visbreaking unit resumed operations and is running at full capacity. The fluid catalytic cracking unit (FCCU) also had problems resulting from the electric fault and underwent an unplanned turnaround on October 21, 2007. The sulfur recovery, Merox, sour water, amine treatment and polymerization units, which are connected to the FCCU, also stopped operating.

All the units are resuming operations during this week and are expected to run at full capacity by November 2, 2007. The remaining units are working at normal rates. A 30-day turnaround in these units (FCCU, sulfur recovery, Merox, sour water, amine treatment and polymerization), which had been scheduled to take place beginning November 17, 2007, has been postponed and will be performed in February 2008.

Ecopetrol processes crude oil and produces fuels and petrochemicals in its refineries: Barrancabermeja (Santander), Cartagena (Bolivar), Apiay (Meta) and Orito (Putumayo). Altogether, the refineries produce about 300,000 barrels per day of various fuels and petrochemical products.

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