Fire shutters operations at Russian refinery

Jan. 13, 2015
Russian independent exploration and production company Urals Energy PCL, Nicosia, Cyprus, said a fire has led to suspended processing activities at subsidiary JSC Petrosakh’s 4,000-b/d refinery, located adjacent to Okruzhnoye field on the eastern coast of Sakhalin Island.

Russian independent exploration and production company Urals Energy PCL, Nicosia, Cyprus, said a fire has led to suspended processing activities at subsidiary JSC Petrosakh’s 4,000-b/d refinery, located adjacent to Okruzhnoye field on the eastern coast of Sakhalin Island.

The Jan. 9 fire damaged control equipment at the refinery, forcing a complete shutdown of plant operations, said Urals Energy in a Jan. 12 statement.

The refinery will remain closed pending repairs to the US-manufactured control equipment, for which Petrosakh management “urgently” is seeking to source replacements, the company said.

Caused by an unidentified accident that occurred during a spat of inclement weather in the region, the fire has not impacted operations at the onshore Okruzhnoye field, which supplies the refinery with a feedstock of light, sweet crude (36° gravity; 0.28% sulfur), according to Urals Energy.

Intended exclusively to process crude from Okruzhnoye (OGJ, July 19, 1999, p. 39), the Petrosakh refinery was originally designed and built by Thomas Russell Co., Tulsa, and then reconstructed at Okruzhnoye field, with Hudson Engineering Corp., Houston, serving as primary contractor, Urals Energy’s web site shows.

Commissioned in May 1994, the refinery consists of a 17-module distillation unit that, in addition to the main distillation tower, includes two stabilization columns, according to Petrosakh’s web site.

Urals Energy has said in presentations to investors that it continues to await amenable market conditions that would justify a capital project to increase the refinery’s processing capacity to about 8,000 b/d through the installation of an additional distillation tower, product cooler, and reboiler furnace.

Contact Robert Brelsford at [email protected].