Two Maintenance Turnarounds Remain for PDVSA Refining Complex This Year

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--According to officials at Venezuela’s Paraguana Complex, there only remains an ongoing turnaround in Crude 1 and Vacuum 1 in the Cardon refinery and another shutdown in Flexicocker in the Amuay refinery to be performed in 2007.

Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA owns the Paraguana Refining Center (Centro de Refinacion Paraguana - CRP), one of the largest refining centers in the world and Venezuela's main source of gasoline exports, which is composed of the Cardon and Amuay refineries, and has a total processing capacity of 935,000 barrels of crude oil per day. Cardon refinery, in Falcon state (Venezuela), has a normal 295,000 bpd production capacity and a total of 30 processing units. Amuay refinery, also in Falcon state, has a production capacity of 640,000 bpd and 29 processing units.

Planned maintenance turnaround in Crude 1 and Vacuum 1 at Cardon refinery began September 15 and is to last 30 mechanical days. Maintenance work during the planned shutdown in Middle Conversion units, that is, HDM, HDS, hydrogen, HDS auxiliaries, HDT1, Flare La Botija, Adip and Sour Water units, which had started on July 21, 2007, has already finished, and the units were expected to be running again by September 29, 2007. The rest of the processing units at Cardon refinery are online. The FFCU and Alkylation 1 expansion, in which PDVSA is planning to expand the current FFCU 11,000 t/d processing capacity to 12,800 t/d and the 1,500 t/d Alkylation 1 capacity to 2,400 t/d, is scheduled to be performed during the first quarter of 2008 and last 110 days. During this expansion turnaround, LPG, Flare, Propane-Propylene, DEA (Diethanol Amine) and salt water lines 4 and 5 are to be shut down for 30 mechanical days; however, these units will remain offline until FCCU and Alkylation are online again. As of today, all processing units at Amuay refinery are online running at normal rates. During the last months of 2007, there only remains a planned maintenance shutdown in Flexicocker to be performed. This turnaround is scheduled to begin on October 8, 2007, and last 30 mechanical days.

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