Enap lets contract for Bio Bio refinery

April 12, 2018
State-owned Empresa Nacional del Petroleo (Enap), has let a contract to KBR Inc., Houston, to provide licensing and engineering services for an upgrading project at subsidiary Enap Refinerias SA’s 116,000-b/d Bio Bio refinery at Hualpen, in Chile’s Bio Bio region.

State-owned Empresa Nacional del Petroleo (Enap), has let a contract to KBR Inc., Houston, to provide licensing and engineering services for an upgrading project at subsidiary Enap Refinerias SA’s 116,000-b/d Bio Bio refinery at Hualpen, in Chile’s Bio Bio region.

As part of the contract, KBR will deliver technology licensing and basic engineering design (LBED) for a 30,000-b/sd plant equipped with KBR’s proprietary ROSE solvent deasphalting technology, the service provider said.

The ROSE unit will split residue from a mix of crude oils into deasphalted oil and asphaltene, allowing the refinery to upgrade a larger proportion of its oil intake into high-grade products.

While it will not change total processing capacity of the refinery, the new unit will enable a different product mix and increase the refinery’s flexibility to respond to market developments while reducing the environmental footprint of its products, according to KBR.

The service provider disclosed neither a value nor timeframe for its work under the LBED contract.

Broader plans

The contract award follows Enap’s recent announcement that it will invest an estimated $245 million on new environmentally friendly projects at the Bio Bio refinery to strengthen competitiveness, reliability, and sustainability of the manufacturing site.

Aimed at incorporating new treatment and environmental-control systems, the considered projects will include the following:

• Construction of a new acid-water treatment plant (SWS 4) with an estimated treatment capacity of 1,600 cu m/day that will increase the refinery’s estimated total treatment capacity up to 3,700 cu m/day.

• Construction of a new sulfur recovery unit (SRU 3) with a nominal production capacity of 140 tonnes/day of sulfuric acid to enable optimization of the sulfur recovery process by reducing the refinery’s emissions of sulfur dioxide and increasing reliability and operational flexibility of the site’s overall sulfur recovery system.

• Updating of the refinery’s steam-supply system by incorporating a new boiler to replace an existing one currently in place.

• Construction of three new crude tanks of 50,000 cu m each and a new slop pond (hydrocarbons for reprocessing) of 5,000 cu m to increase overall crude storage capacity.

• Construction of a new loading yard with modernized installations that will include five storage tanks, a pump yard, four multipurpose cargo islands (Class I and II fuels), and a specific island for Class IIIA fuels to trucks.

While it did confirm an official timeframe for when it would begin work on the proposed upgrades, Enap estimates a project construction phase of 26 months once under way, according to a Mar. 29 release from the operator.

These latest proposed projects at Bio Bio comes as part of Enap’s program to fulfill several short and long-term commitments to Chilean legal and regulatory authorities under which Enap pledges to invest in projects and initiatives intended to reduce impacts of the refinery’s operations on the surrounding environment (OGJ Online, Jan. 4, 2017).

Contact Robert Brelsford at [email protected].