BPCL to shut crude unit, secondary capacity at Kochi refinery in December

NEW DELHI, - India's state-run Bharat Petroleum Corp (BPCL) will shut the crude distillation unit and the secondary units at its Kochi oil refinery that were installed last year for maintenance starting in December, a company official said on Tuesday. BPCL will shut the crude unit with 210,000 barrels per day (bpd) of processing capacity along with the secondary units for about three weeks, said R. Ramachandran, BPCL's head of refineries. "It (this shutdown) is mandatory to inspect the new plant after you run it for a year. We will open up some of the critical equipment to see if things are intact," Ramachandran told Reuters on Tuesday. BPCL last year installed new crude distillation capacity by combining an existing 90,000 bpd unit with 120,000 bpd of new capacity, raising overall distillation output at Kochi by 63 percent to 310,000 bpd. The company also installed new secondary units as part of the expansion including a delayed coker, fluid catalytic cracker, vacuum gasoil hydro-treater, diesel hydro-treater, sulphur Recovery Unit, and hydrogen generation unit (HGU). All of those units will be shut during the maintenance, said Ramachandran.

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