PDVSA Restarts Cat Cracker at Willemstad Isla Refinery in Curacao after Early December Outage

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--The cat cracker at the Willemstad Isla refinery operated by Venezuela's state-owned oil company PDVSA in Curacao, which had to be shut down, along with the rest of the processing units on December 3, 2007, after a power failure, was brought back online on December 19, 2007, and has been operating without inconveniences; however, six of the 34 units are still down.

The refinery has been producing 240,000 barrels per day because the middle conversion and treatment units cannot handle high production levels. The plant is composed of 34 processing units. Thermal Cracker 1 has been offline because of feed stock programming since mid-August 2007. Thermal Cracker 2, which is running at normal rates, will be shut down in October 2008. For more details, see related November 27, 2007, article - PDVSA Refinery in Curacao Running at Reduced Capacity.

A power failure at the refinery brought about the complete shutdown of all the processing units for 24 hours. After the power outage, a problem emerged when trying to restart the cat cracker. The generator had to be opened, and work is ongoing. For more details, see December 11, 2007, article - Several Units Remain Offline after Power Outage at PDVSA Refinery in Curacao.

Alkylation, Crude 2A, SRU 1, 2 and 3 and Feed Preparation Vacuum 2 are still offline and are scheduled to be restarted in sequence after the FCCU is online. A planned maintenance shutdown in SRU 3 was being performed at the time of the outage, and maintenance work has already been completed. The six offline units are expected to be running at normal rates by December 27, 2007. All other units, except Thermal Cracker 1, which is offline because of feed stock programming, are online and processing normally.

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