MOSCOW (MRC) -- Equinor's Mongstad oil refinery in Norway was evacuated following a naphtha leak at the facility's diesel-making unit on but output was unaffected, reported Reuters with reference to the company's statement.
There were no injuries and the leak has been stopped, police separately said.
"The situation has been normalised and people are back at work," Equinor spokesperson Eskil Eriksen said, adding that only non-essential staff had been evacuated.
"It has not affected production."
Mongstad is Equinor's largest refinery and has a crude oil and condensate distillation capacity of 226,000 barrels per day, according to the company.
The wider Mongstad area contains refinery operations, a terminal for crude oil exports as well as other facilities.
As MRC informed earlier, there were serious breaches of regulations at an Equinor methanol plant that caught fire last year, Norway's petroleum safety watchdog (PSA) said in June 2021, ordering the company to improve maintenance practices and documentation.
In October 2017, Mongstad suffered a two-week outage caused by a naphtha leak, and in December 2018 Equinor halted parts of the refinery's gasoline output following a spill of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG).
Ethylene and propylene are the main feedstocks for the production of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), respectively.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,396,960 tonnes in January-July 2021, up by 7% year on year. Shipments of all grades of ethylene polymers increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 841,990 tonnes in the first seven months of 2021, up by 29% year on year. Supply of propylene homopolymers (homopolymer PP) and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased, whereas supply of statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) subsided.
MRC