Power Outage Shuts Down Processing Units at San Nicolas Refinery in Aruba

---

Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--All of the processing units at Valero Energy Corporation’s San Nicolas refinery in Aruba have been offline since October 5, 2007, because of a power outage. Start-ups are expected to begin on October 14, 2007, with normal production rates expected to be reached by October 22, 2007. The San Nicolas refinery has 21 processing units and a total production capacity of 275,000 barrels per day.

The power outage brought about a problem in the interconnection of the refinery’s power plant and the power substation. All of the units were shut down. A maintenance team is performing welding work in Hydrogen 1 and 2, which is expected to be finished by Friday. The refinery’s power plant and the fuel system have begun to operate; however the restarting process of the processing units is to begin by using methanol instead of hydrogen until the current problem is solved. C7 will go back online first, then coker with vacuum 5 and the heavy gas-oil hydrotreater. Before the outage occurred, maintenance work in the diesel hydrotreater, which had started on August 13, along with Hydrogen 2 for 48 mechanical days, was already finished, and the unit was ready to be restarted; however, the outage delayed the unit to go back online. Maintenance work in Hydrogen 2 is expected to be completed by October 15, 2007. One of the furnaces of Crude 7, which processes 120,000 barrels per day, is also being repaired, which is why this unit has not been able to process at normal rates. Once online, it will remain de-rated until the first week of November 2007.

View Plant Profile - 1020148

Industrial Info Resources (IIR) provides marketing communication services ranging from industrial database solutions to market forecasting, custom analytics, and specialty promotions that support high-level image campaigns.