Power Outage Forces All Units Offline at PDVSA's Willemstad Isla Refinery

---

Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--The Willemstad Isla refinery, operated by Venezuela's state-owned oil company PDVSA in Curacao, remains offline after a power outage shut down all of the 34 processing units.

Power was restored 14 hours after the electrical problem occurred; however, all of the steam and cooling systems are still offline, preventing the restart of the processing units. The power outage occurred at a time as several units from the HDX Complex were reaching normal production rates after a 50-day planned maintenance shutdown. The turnaround began on February 8, 2008, and involved eight units: naphtha hydrotreater, mild hydrocracker, lubes hydrotreatment, polymerization plant, platforming and diesel hydrotreatment. The reformer unit had to be shutdown a week before the turnaround start date because of a boiler problem.

The Willemstad Isla refinery has a maximum processing capacity of 320,000 barrels per day (BBL/d); however, it generally processes 240,000 BBL/d because the middle conversion and treatment units cannot handle high production levels. During the HDX complex's turnaround, the refinery was set to process 201,000 BBL/d. For more details, view related February 7, 2008, article - Unplanned Shutdown Forces Platforming Unit Offline at PDVSA's Willemstad Isla Refinery.

When the power outage occurred, Thermal cracker 1 was offline and not running as a crude distillation unit. HV6 was kept on standby mode, and only one out of the five sulfur recovering units, SRU3, was online. Of the remaining SRUs, SRU2 was under maintenance work, and the others were on standby. The mild hydrocracker was the only unit from the HDX Complex which remained offline.

PDVSA also owns the Paraguana Refining Center (Centro de Refinacion Paraguana), one of the largest refining centers in the world and Venezuela's main source of gasoline exports, that is composed of the Cardon and Amuay refineries. Cardon refinery, in Falcon state (Venezuela), has a 295,000 BBL/d production capacity and 30 processing units.

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.