ADNOC to Restart Fire-Hit Ruwais Refinery
Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) said on Jan. 17 it hoped to restart its fire-impacted Takreer refinery at Ruwais, Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates before the end of this week. According to reports, the blaze that broke out on Jan. 11 forced the shutdown of about half the facility, which has capacity estimated at 800,000--1 million bbl/d of crude oil.
The upstream outage impacted downstream supplies of polypropylene to the production facilities of the company’s Borouge joint venture with Vienna, Austria-based Borealis and forced it to temporarily shut down two PP lines. However, Borourge said inventories were nevertheless sufficient to supply customers. Altogether, the jv has capacity to produce around 1.76 million tonnes of the polymer.
With the refinery off line for a week, the 417,000 bbl/d crude distillation unit (CDU), its hydrotreating units and a new 127,000 bbl/day residue catalytic cracking (RFCC) are said to have been starved of material. News agency said naphtha fundamentals were not significantly impacted.
In other news, ADNOC announced earlier this month it will seek to enter more strategic partnerships to develop new business activities as part of its strategy up to 2030. This is said to be part of a new strategic plan unveiled in November 2016, which foresees increasing oil output by 400,000 bbl/d to 3.5 million bbl/d by 2018 and more than doubling petrochemical output from 4.5 million t/y in 2016 to 11.4 million t/y by 2025.
As one of the first partnerships, agreed in December 2016, ADNOC will sell a 10% stake in the Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Petroleum Operations (ADCO) to oil and petrochemicals major BP. In exchange for the stake, BP agreed to issue new ordinary shares to Abu Dhabi worth $2.2 billion.
