PDVSA's Willemstad Isla Refinery Performs Last 2008's Planned Turnarounds

---

Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Thermal Cracker 1 at the 325,000-barrel-per-day (BBL/d) Willemstad Isla Refinery in Curacao, owned by Venezuela's state-owned oil company PDVSA, has been shut down since June 16 for major maintenance repairs. The planned turnaround for Thermal Cracker 2 is to begin the first week of November.

Maintenance work in Thermal Cracker 1 is set to be finished by October 23; the unit will be restarted by the end of the month. Once this unit is stable, Thermal Cracker 2 will be shut down in order to perform steam and air-furnace decoking, which will last seven days. According to plant officials, the Vacuum 8 Unit (HV-8) will be shut down October 26 to have 14 days of maintenance work.

The refinery experienced two power outages this year. The first one occurred on April 9 as several units from the hydrotreatment operation area were reaching normal production rates after a 50-day planned maintenance shutdown. For more details, view related news article from April 10, 2008 - Power Outage Forces All Units Offline at PDVSA's Willemstad Isla Refinery. The second outage occurred on April 14. For details, view news article from April 14, 2008 - PDVSA's Willemstad Isla Refinery Experiencing Another Power Outage. Because of these two power outages, planned maintenance on the 45,000-BBL/d Crude CD-2A and 48,000-BBL/d vacuum unit, also known as Feed Cracker Unit 2, was delayed for four months. Both units were scheduled to begin 37 days of planned turnaround maintenance work on September 7, but are now set to undergo maintenance beginning January 8, 2009.

View Plant Profile - 1032235

Industrial Info Resources (IIR) is a marketing information service specializing in industrial process, energy and financial related markets with products and services ranging from industry news, analytics, forecasting, plant and project databases, as well as multimedia services.