Conoco Inc. is recycling a large part of its Ponca City, Okla., refinery's lubricants plant.
The company enlisted marketing assistance from United World Group (UWG), Denver, to capitalize on high worldwide demand for existing lubricants facilities.
UWG bought the idle unit and resold it to jinling Petrochemical Corp., Nanjing, China.
ULTIMATE RECYCLING
During the next year and a half, workers will dismantle the plant for shipment to China, where it will be rebuilt and placed on stream.
Units destined for China include the solvent treating plant, Furfural, Duosol and No. 2 MEK units, blowmolding, compounding, and packaging equipment, and supporting storage tanks.
The pieces are being crated and trucked to Tulsa for shipment by barge to the Gulf of Mexico, where they will be loaded on ships for the voyage to China.
The units produced 800,000 bbl/year of wax free oil and 100,000 bbl/year of hard wax. They were shut down in 1992.
Conoco is providing its expertise to start up the equipment and train the Chinese to operate it.
Workers are dismantling the storage tanks for sale on the scrap metal market and dismantling the blowmold and compound and packaging equipment for shipment.
Work on the Furfural, Duosol, and NO. 2 MEK is to start early next summer. The Furfural and Duosol units were built in 1939 and the No. 2 MEK in 1969.
"It's nice to know that a piece of Ponca City refinery is going to continue to be productive rather than becoming just a memory," said Mark Noble, a Conoco spokesman.
Copyright 1994 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.
