MOSCOW (MRC) -- A catalytic reformer was shut on Sunday night at Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s 211,270-barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery in Convent, Louisiana, after a brief fire, reported Rueters with reference to sources familiar with plant operations.
The reformer has the capacity to process 40,000 bpd of feedstock, according to Refinitiv Eikon.
Shell spokesman Ray Fisher said the fire was quickly extinguished and there were no injuries.
Fisher also said Shell is investigating the cause of the fire.
He declined to discuss the status of individual units at the refinery, but said, "We will bring our units back on line only when it is safe to do so."
As MRC wrote before, Royal Dutch Shell Plc restarted the hydrocracker at its 225,300 barrel-per-day (bpd) Norco, Louisiana, refinery in mid-October 2019. 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 operations were stable on 13 September 2019 at Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s 340,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) joint-venture refinery in Deer Park, Texas, after the upper Houston Ship Channel was closed by protesters from Greenpeace USA. The Deer Park refinery is a 50-50 joint-venture between Shell and Mexico’s national oil company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex). Shell is the managing partner of the joint-venture. Shell has three crackers at Deer Park site with a combined ethylene capacity of 1,67 mln per year and petrochemical plants.
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).
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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