Abu Dhabi National Oil Company has begun an investigation into the causes of a major fire at a refinery at its complex in Ruwais, about 250 kilometres west of Abu Dhabi city.
The fire which occurred earlier this month, caused no injuries to employees nor posed any emissions threat to the local community, the company said.
But it has caused significant disruption to operations and industry analysts expect a prolonged outage to affect its processing capacity.
The company said it is not yet clear exactly where the fire originated, except that it was downstream of its 127,000 barrels per day residue fluidised catalytic cracking (rfcc) unit, which is one of the largest of its type in the world and was the centrepiece of the US$9 billion expansion that doubled overall Ruwais processing capacity last year.
Led by a South Korean consortium, the expansion increased overall plant capacity to 900,000 bpd to meet growing domestic demand for petrol, diesel and jet fuel, as well as to meet the specifications for export markets and to feed an expanding petrochemicals plant.
The company said late on Friday that it had started to ramp up its crude distillation unit, which is upstream of the rfcc unit.
It said ”following further investigation into the incident last week at the Ruwais west refinery, we can confirm that gasoline and propylene production has been partially impacted and Adnoc is working on providing them from other sources”.
The company did not say how long the investigation might take or when it expected full capacity to be restored.
The fire is believed to have originated in the rfcc’s cracked naphtha hydro treating unit, Adnoc has clarified.
The Ruwais refinery upgrade was linked to the expansion of the adjacent Borouge petrochemicals joint venture operation between Adnoc and Borealis, the Austrian petrochemicals company which is 64 per cent owned by Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Company.
Borouge takes feedstock from Ruwais to make 4.5 million tonnes of polyethylene and other products, and it is not yet clear how its operations will be affected.
Analysts at the consultancy Energy Aspects have highlighted that the plant has had issues since its commissioning in February 2015 including the rfcc’s excessive catalyst consumption.
Adnoc said that these issues were not a factor in the blaze.
amcauley@thenational.ae
Follow The National's Business section on Twitter
