MOSCOW (MRC) -- Exxon Mobil Corp has made preliminary plans to restart the large crude distillation unit (CDU) at its 502,500 barrel-per-day (bpd) Baton Rouge, Louisiana, refinery later this week, sources familiar with plant operations said, as per Hydrocarbonprocessing.
Most of the refinery’s units, including the three CDUs, were shut early on Wednesday after a natural gas line in a group of pipes caught fire late on Tuesday night, the sources said. The fire is contained but continued to burn on Wednesday morning in the pipeline area.
No injuries were reported from the fire, Exxon said earlier on Wednesday. A company spokesman said Exxon would continue to meet its contractual commitments.
The 210,000-bpd PSLA-10 CDU is the largest of three at the refinery doing the primary conversion of crude oil into hydrocarbon feedstock for all other production units.
An assessment of the damage to the bundle of pipelines where the fire is burning has yet to be done, the sources said.
One of the two 110,000-bpd gasoline producing fluidic catalytic cracking units (FCCUs) continues to operate at the minimal production level while one of the light ends units is also in operation at minimum rates, the sources said.
The Baton Rouge refinery is the second-largest in Louisiana and the fifth-largest in the United States by capacity. It is Exxon’s second-largest refinery in the nation.
As MRC informed earlier, a fire at Exxon Mobil Corp’s 502,500 barrel-per-day Baton Rouge refinery in Louisiana was extinguished by the refinery’s fire team on 12 February. The company earlier said the fire was contained in the area it occurred and there were no reported injuries with all personnel accounted for. Exxon is monitoring air quality in the refinery and surrounding areas, company spokesman Jeremy Eikenberry said in an emailed response. The company operates a cracker at this site with the annual production capacity of 1 mln tonnes of ethylene и 575,000 tonnes of propylene, which was shut for maintenance on 11 February 2019 to mid-Apirl 2019.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 2,093,260 tonnes in 2019, up by 6% year on year. Shipments of all PE grades increased. PE shipments rose from both domestic producers and foreign suppliers. The estimated PP consumption in the Russian market was 1,260,400 tonnes in January-December 2019, up by 4% year on year. Supply of almost all grades of propylene polymers increased, except for statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers).
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