Marathon Ashland Petroleum Expects February Restart of Louisiana Refinery

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources; Houston, Texas). Marathon Ashland Petroleum LLC (Findlay, Ohio) shutdown its 250,000 barrel-per-day Garyville, Louisiana refinery Sunday morning, due to two fires. At 4:30am, a transformer caught fire, that caused a power outage to occur on one side of the refinery. Minutes later, as the refinery was shutting down, a valve opened on the crude unit starting a second fire, which blazed for several hours. Refinery workers and Entergy are working together to replace the transformer and lay new cables to restore power on that feed line.

The power outage caused the sump pumps on the crude unit to stop working, contaminating the ground with gas-oil. As a result, soil is in the process being removed and booms set-up in effluent ditches. Repairs to the concrete pad, electrical leads and cable trays that support the crude and vacuum units will also need repairs. One source told Industrialinfo.com the crude unit would not restart until early February. It is estimated an additional $30 million will be required to repair fire damaged areas.

Currently the entire plant is shutdown, with the exception of the steam boilers, while workers inspect the process units and access the damage. Previous planned maintenance set to begin January 20th, will begin immediately on the catalytic cracking unit, alkylation unit, and delayed coker. But before work can begin, product lines will need to be cleared using compressed air due to the process units not being shutdown properly. The coker is scheduled to restart January 26th, followed by the cat cracker and alkylation units in March. Marathon Ashland allocated $90 million in capital and maintenance for this planned turnaround, of which $65+ million to upgrade its cat cracker.

Marathon Ashland Petroleum LLC, was formed in 1998 by combining the downstream operations of Marathon Oil Company, a 62 percent owner and Ashland Inc., a 38 percent owner. Currently MAP LLC owns and operates seven refineries in the U.S, which process 953,000 barrels per day of crude oil.