Mangalore Refinery & Petrochemicals Ltd. (MRPL), a subsidiary of India’s Oil & Natural Gas Corp. Ltd., has commissioned a 650,000 tonne/year coker heavy gas oil hydrotreating unit (CHTU) at its 194,000-b/d refinery in Mangalore, India (OGJ Online, June 8, 2010).
A secondary processing unit of MRPL’s Phase 3 expansion project at Mangalore, the CHTU began operations on May 10, the company said.
The CHTU, which required an investment of about 4.43 billion rupees, was built by Maire Tecnimont SPA-subsidiary Tecnimont ICB India Ltd. and uses Honeywell subsidiary UOP LLC’s Unionfining process technology, according to MRPL.
On May 11, vacuum gas oil treated by the CHTU was then routed to a feed storage tank for the refinery’s petroleum fluidized catalytic convertor unit, on which precommissioning and commissioning activities are progressing rapidly, the company added.
The refiner previously commissioned a 3 million tpy delayed coking unit that is part of the long-delayed Phase 3 expansion in April (OGJ Online, Apr. 4, 2014).
The Phase 3 expansion project, announced in February 2010, was designed to increase the refinery’s complexity and profitability by increasing refining capacity to 300,000 b/d as well as equip the plant to process lower-cost heavy, sour, and high-TAN crudes, according to past MRPL annual reports.
