Unit at Cardon Refinery Still Down after Early December Outage

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--On December 3, 2007, a power outage originated by a failure in Venezuela's interconnected power grid affected PDVSA's 295-barrel-per-day Cardon refinery, halting all units. The start-up process began on December 4, 2007. For more details, view related December 10, 2007, article - Power Outage Halts Activities at Cardon Refinery in Venezuela.

At present, the catalytic cracking unit is the only one in the refinery that has not been able to resume operations and is still not processing. The unit's compressor was damaged during a restart attempt. Authorities expected to begin the start-up process after maintenance work ended between December 16, 2007, and December 18, 2007. Furthermore, Cardon's steam boilers were affected, along with the catalytic cracking unit, reducing the refinery's output. Cardon is currently producing 260,000 barrels per day. Cardon has six steam boilers capable of 80 to 90 tons of steam per hour, and in normal conditions, the plant functions with only five boilers. One is usually kept as a reserve.

Now, three of the plant's five steam boilers are down; two of them stopped working after the power incident, and another one had already stopped working before the blackout to undergo a maintenance turnaround, which has not finished yet. These three boilers are being repaired, pipes and security valves are being changed, and chemical cleaning is to be performed. Authorities expect to have them back online by mid-January 2008. Until all the necessary steam boilers are operating again, the plant will make use of four portable boilers capable of 10 to 12 tons of steam per hour that PDVSA will rent from two local companies. Furthermore, Cardon, which is part of the Paraguana Refining Complex, will continue receiving steam supply from other neighboring companies it has interconnection with and which have already been aiding the refinery.

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