MOSCOW (MRC) -- Royal Dutch Shell Plc cut back production on the crude distillation unit (CDU) and shut the coker at its 225,300-barrel-per-day (bpd) Norco refinery in Louisiana, reported Reuters sources familiar with the plant operations said.
Three workers were also injured on the same day after the release of hot condensate from the gasoline-producing residual catalytic cracking unit (RCCU) at the Norco refinery, the sources said late Wednesday.
It was unclear if the two events were related, the sources said.
Shell spokesman Ray Fisher declined to discuss the status of operations at the refinery.
The three contract workers were taken to a local hospital and are expected to recover completely, Fisher said.
Production at the 240,000-bpd DU-5 CDU was reduced to repair a leak, the sources said. The cut in CDU production stopped residual crude going to the 25,000-bpd coker and it had to be shut, the sources said.
The CDU does the primary refining of crude oil into feedstocks for all other production units at the refinery.
Cokers convert residual crude oil supplied by distillation units into feedstock for motor fuels or petroleum coke - a coal substitute.
As MRC informed before, in mid-October 2019, Royal Dutch Shell Plc restarted the hydrocracker at its 225,300 barrel-per-day (bpd) Norco, Louisiana, refinery. The 40,000 bpd hydrocracker was shut on Sept. 9 for a planned month-long overhaul. A longer than expected restart of the unit stretched the outage to six weeks.
We also remind that Shell Singapore restarted its naphtha cracker in Bukom Island on 7-10 December, following a two months maintenance shutdown since the beginning of October 2019. Thus, this cracker was taken off-stream for the turnaround on 1 October 2019. The cracker is able to produce 960,000 tons/year of ethylene and 550,000 tons/year of propylene.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polyprolypele (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,724,670 tonnes in the first ten months of 2019, up by 7% year on year. Shipments of all PE grades increased. The estimated PP consumption in the Russian market in January-October 2019 totalled 1,066,520 tonnes, up by 7% year on year. Supply of block copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymer) and homopolymer of propylene (homopolymer PP) increased, demand for statistical copolymers (PP random copolymer) decreased.
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.
MRC