RIL’s Jamnagar refining complex due for maintenance

March 12, 2015
Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), Mumbai, will undertake a month-long, planned maintenance turnaround beginning in mid-March at its 1.24 million-b/d Jamnagar refining and petrochemical complex in Gujarat, India.

Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), Mumbai, will undertake a month-long, planned maintenance turnaround beginning in mid-March at its 1.24 million-b/d Jamnagar refining and petrochemical complex in Gujarat, India.

Starting on Mar. 15, the company will shut down one of the refinery’s four crude distillation units (CDU) and its 200,000-b/d fluid catalytic cracker (FCC) for about 4 weeks to conduct scheduled maintenance activities, RIL said in a Mar. 12 filing to India’s BSE Ltd. (formerly Bombay Stock Exchange).

While RIL did not disclose the precise nature of work to be executed during the turnaround, the company did confirm part of the maintenance will involve carrying out necessary modifications of the units to improve and enhance their reliability and performance.

Although the CDU and FCC will remain shuttered for the duration of the maintenance period, the refinery’s three remaining CDUs, as well as all other secondary processing units, will continue to operate at normal rates, RIL said.

Customer supply commitments will not be interrupted as a result of the maintenance, the company said.

RIL recently has let a series of contracts for work related to the Phase 3 expansion project at the Jamnagar complex (OGJ Online, Feb. 26, 2015; Aug. 8, 2014; Jan. 22, 2014).

Known as J3, the project is designed to increase production capacity of ethylene and other petroleum products at the complex, which includes expanding Jamnagar’s gasification plants, ethylene cracker complex, and paraxylene plant.

The refinery off-gas cracker expansion would increase Jamnagar’s production capacities as follows: ethylene to 3.248 million tonnes/year from 1.883 million tpy; propylene to 913,000 tpy from 759,000 tpy; monoethylene glycol to 1.466 million tpy from 733,000 tpy; low-density polyethylene to 590,000 tpy from 190,000 tpy; high-density and linear low-density polyethylene to 1.478 million tpy from 928,000 tpy; and paraxylene to 3.656 million tpy from 1.856 million tpy (OGJ Online, May 3, 2012).