MOSCOW (MRC) -- Royal Dutch Shell Plc is restarting a heavy oil hydrocracker at its 209,787 barrel per day (bpd) refinery in Convent, Louisiana, said sources familiar with plant operations, reported Reuters.
The 45,000 bpd hydrocracker, called the H-Oil Unit, was shut earlier on Sunday after a fire, the sources said.
"No injuries, no offsite impact," said Shell spokesman Ray Fisher.
The fire broke out at about 1:30 a.m. (0630 GMT) on Sunday, the sources said.
The H-Oil Unit is an atypical hydrocracker because it converts residual crude oil into motor fuels, especially diesel. Residual crude is normally processed by coking units.
Hydrocrackers use hydrogen and a catalyst under high heat and pressure to produce motor fuels, usually starting with gas oil as a feedstock.
As MRC wrote before, in May 2018, China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and Shell Nanhai B.V. (Shell) announced the official start-up of the second ethylene cracker at their Nanhai petrochemicals complex in Huizhou, Guangdong Province, China. The new ethylene cracker increases ethylene capacity at the complex by around 1.2 million tonnes per year, more than doubling the capacity of the complex, and benefits from a deep integration with adjacent CNOOC refineries. The new facility will also include a styrene monomer and propylene oxide (SMPO) plant, which will be the largest in China when it begins operations.
Royal Dutch Shell plc is an Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its registered office in London, United Kingdom. It is the biggest company in the world in terms of revenue and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors". Shell is vertically integrated and is active in every area of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, petrochemicals, power generation and trading.
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