Fire hits Singapore Refining’s Jurong Island refinery

Singapore Refining Co. Private Ltd. (SRC), a joint venture of PetroChina Co. Ltd. subsidiary Singapore Petroleum Co. Ltd. and Chevron Corp., is recovering from a fire that broke out on June 13 in a major processing unit of its 290,000-b/d refinery on Jurong Island, Singapore.

The fire, which occurred at about 9:50 a.m. local time in one of the refinery’s three crude distillation units (CDU), was extinguished by SRC’s in-house emergency response team and the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) at about 11:10 a.m., SCDF said in a social media posting.

SCDF confirmed no casualties have been reported as a result of the incident.

While SRC has yet to issue an official statement regarding the fire’s impact to current operations at the refinery, local media outlets out of Singapore are reporting SRC has shuttered the crude unit indefinitely.

Neither a cause of the fire nor the specific CDU impacted by the event could be confirmed.

SRC operates three CDUs at the Jurong Island refinery, including CDU 1 (commissioned in 1973), CDU 2 (commissioned in 1980), and CDU 3 (commissioned in 1995).

Last year, SRC let a contract for front-end engineering design on proposed upgrades to the manufacturing complex’s naphtha splitter, naphtha hydrotreater, and catalytic reformer as part of a broader series of in-house and strategic projects the operator has undertaken to ensure its long-term competitiveness (OGJ Online, Sept. 21, 2016).

Contact Robert Brelsford at [email protected].