Gazprom Reveals Latest Moscow Refinery Additions

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland)--Modernisation work at the 12.15 million-tonne-per-year (tpy) Moscow refinery has reached a new milestone with the installation of a new reforming column which weighs in at 150 million tonnes and is 60 metres high.

Refinery owner Gazprom Neft (MCX:SIBN) (Moscow, Russia), the oil arm of Russia's state-owned OAO Gazprom (PINK:OGAZPY) (Moscow), said that the column forms a key part of the Euro+ combined oil refining unit (Euro+ CORU) at the refinery, which will increase the yield of light petroleum products, facilitate the move towards a four-year run life, improve energy efficiency and significantly reduce environmental impacts. The company claimed that the new technology and units will reduce the plant's environmental impact by 11.1% on every tonne of oil refined.

The reforming column consists of four reactors arranged one on top of the other, into which gasoline fractions will flow from the crude distillation unit (CDU) for interaction with catalyst. By using modern continuous-recovery technology, Gazprom Neft said that the process of regenerating catalyst activity occurs without any pause in production, "allowing further improvements in production efficiency". The Euro+ CORU facility has capacity to process one million tonnes of crude per year.

Construction of the Euro+ facility began in late 2016, with 20% of works now complete. More than 11,600 piles have now been driven into the earth, and filled with 24,000 tonnes of concrete--75% of the total volume. Nine thousand tonnes of metal structures have been delivered to the plant and 22 of a total 31 pieces of major equipment have been installed.

The Euro+ CORU project, according to Oil and Gas Journal, will see the installation of:

• A 6 million-tpy primary atmospheric-vacuum distillation unit (CDU-VDU 6)
• A 1 million-tpy gasoline reforming unit
• A 2 million-tpy diesel (distillate) hydrotreating unit, which will include an iso-de-waxing unit
• A gas fractionation unit
• An amine regeneration unit.

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