OMV Petrom completes planned maintenance at Petrobrazi refinery

OMV Aktiengesellschaft’s majority owned OMV Petrom SA has wrapped scheduled maintenance and restarted production of fuels at its 4.5-million tonne/year (tpy) Petrobrazi refinery in southeast Romania, near Ploiesti City, about 60 km from Bucharest.

Alongside replacing catalysts and various equipment and components during the planned shutdown period, the operator executed routine maintenance works and regular inspections of equipment to ensure the refinery’s installations continue to operate safely, efficiently, and in accordance with environmental safety standards as part of the site’s broader efficiency improvement initiatives, OMV Petrom said.

Specific works carried out during the maintenance event—which OMV Petrom completed as of May 29 at an overall investment of around €20 million—included:

• Replacement of catalyst in the diesel hydrotreater unit, as well as catalyst across other unidentified installations, to maintain high-quality fuel production.
• Inspection, maintenance, and removal of deposits from the refinery’s main crude oil atmospheric and vacuum distillation unit.
• Inspection, maintenance, and removal of deposits from the site’s 2019-revamped coking unit (OGJ Online, Nov. 19, 2020).

In total, more than 230 pieces of equipment, 350 pipelines, and 650 reinforcements were inspected and repaired, contributing to the refinery’s ongoing safe and efficient operation, the operator said.

The routine, abbreviated maintenance shutdown which occurs at least once every 2 years was preceded most recently by the more extensive site-wide refinery turnaround executed in second-quarter 2023 (OGJ Online, Aug. 23, 2023).