Spain's Bilbao Refinery Workers Strike

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources Latin America (Cordoba, Argentina)--Workers of Petronor SA (Bilbao, Spain), a subsidiary of Repsol YPF SA (PINK:REPYY) (Madrid, Spain), began a union strike on November 18 at the company's 240,000-barrel-per-day (BBL/d) refinery in Bilbao, Spain.

Petronor was forced to halt operations at the facility, as the strike will run through November 23. The 100,000-BBL/d Crude 2 unit went offline on November 15. The 89,000-BBL/d vacuum unit and 33,000-BBL/d visbreaker were shut down 24 hours later. The 46,000-BBL/d fluid catalytic cracking unit (FCCU) and 140,000-BBL/d Crude 1 unit were scheduled to shut down late Thursday evening, November 17. Thus, the whole refinery was scheduled to be completely offline by November 18 at 3 p.m. local time, when the strike was scheduled to officially begin. Restart procedures will commence on November 23, and expectations are to have the units up and running by November 27.

This is the fourth strike that Bilbao has faced in 2011. The facility went offline due to strikes aiming to improve labor working conditions in June, July and October 2011. These actions usually last between 4 to 5 days and always affected production.

Petronor is performing the last phase of the Fuel Oil Reduction Unit Project. The project involves the construction of a new 36,000-BBL/d delayed coker, a coker naphtha desulfurization unit, two 100-ton-per-day new sulfur recovery units and other facilities. The project construction and commissioning was completed last October, and expectations were to introduce feed into the delayed coker unit by November 25. However, the oil-in procedure has been delayed until the strike ends and the refinery returns to operating at normal rates.

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