Unipetrol RPA SRO-Rafinerie, the refining arm of Unipetrol AS and parent company Polski Koncern Naftowy SA (PKN Orlen), has completed the largest turnaround in the history of its 3.3 million-tonne/year Kralupy nad Vltavou refinery in Czech Republic.
Completed as of May 24, the planned 6-week turnaround of the refinery—which has now returned to full operations—cost more than 1 billion koruna ($45.35 million), of which 400 million koruna were spent on new investment projects, Unipetrol said.
Compared to previous turnarounds at Kralupy—the last of which was executed in 2013—the scope of the recently completed maintenance event differed in both volume of service and investment, the operator said.
In addition to detailed inspection and maintenance of all installations, Unipetrol modernized the technologies in the refinery’s main production units to preemptively meet the deadline for implementing best available techniques (BAT) that will be required by legislation of the European Union and the Czech Republic beginning in 2020, said Jaroslav Hacko, production manager at the Kralupy refinery.
While the operator revealed no new details regarding the specific projects involved during the maintenance event, Hacko previously confirmed in a Mar. 19 release that the turnaround would include:
• Replacement of the reactor and part of the combustion chamber in the FCC.
• Modernization of the reforming furnace.
• Installation of twisted heat exchangers and new filling in the reactor stripper of the FCC.
Completion of the turnaround follows commissioning earlier in the year of a renovated wastewater treatment plant at the refinery to meet the strictest European Union requirements for minimizing the impact of industrial manufacturing on the environment, according to a Mar. 13 release from Unipetrol.
As a result of the nearly 200 million-koruna wastewater plant renovation, the volume of pollutants released by the site into the environment has been reduced by up to 75%, and odors from operations have been eliminated, the operator said.
The Kralupy nad Vltavou refinery processes about one third of the estimated 8 million tpy of total crude oil supplies imported into the Czech Republic from Russia via the Druzhba pipeline, and from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, as well as Arab and African countries via the Ingolstadt-Kralupy nad Vltavou-Litvinov (IKL) pipeline, which follows the TAL oil pipeline from Trieste, Italy.
Unipetrol also owns and operates the 5.4 million-tpy refinery in Zaluzi u Litvinova (Litvinov), Czech Republic.
Contact Robert Brelsford at [email protected].
