MOSCOW (MRC) -- Pengerang Refining and Petrochemical (PrefChem), a joint venture between Petronas and Saudi Aramco, has begun to restart a crude distillation unit (CDU) at its oil refinery in Malaysia, reported Reuters with reference to Petronas' statement.
Malaysia’s state oil firm said the refinery had started feeding crude oil into the unit earlier this week, confirming an earlier Reuters report citing sources.
"We confirm that the refinery has started feeding crude to its CDU earlier this week in efforts to restart the plant," Petronas told Reuters over email.
The Pengerang Refining development, part of Petronas’ USD27 billion Pengerang Integrated Complex, consists of a 300,000 barrels-per-day (bpd) oil refinery and a petrochemical complex with a production capacity of 7.7 million tonnes per year in the southern Malaysian state of Johor.
The project, originally known as RAPID, or Refinery and Petrochemical Integrated Development, was shut in April after a fire damaged its atmospheric residue desulfurization (ARDS) unit.
It had been scheduled to restart last month but that was pushed back to August, they said.
Repairs at the ARDS unit were expected to take months so the refinery has modified the type of crude it processes to low-sulfur oil such as Murban crude from Abu Dhabi, the sources said.
Petronas said the ARDS is scheduled to come back online in 2020.
The refinery’s strong demand for Murban crude saw Malaysia’s imports of the oil jump to about 4.6 million barrels in June and July, Refinitiv data showed.
As MRC wrote previously, Petronas is in plans to take its low density polyethylene (LDPE) plant off-stream for a brief maintenance. The company is likely to start turnaround at its plant in end-August, 2019. The plant is slated to remain off-line for around end-September, 2019. Located at Kerteh in Terrenganu, Malaysia, LDPE plant has a production capacity of 255,000 mt/year.
Petronas, short for Petroliam Nasional Berhad, is a Malaysian oil and gas company wholly owned by the Government of Malaysia. The Group is engaged in a wide spectrum of petroleum activities, including upstream exploration and production of oil and gas to downstream oil refining; marketing and distribution of petroleum products; trading; gas processing and liquefaction; gas transmission pipeline network operations; marketing of liquefied natural gas; petrochemical manufacturing and marketing; shipping; automotive engineering; and property investment.
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