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TotalEnergies Texas refinery running at minimal rates, say sources
Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
By Erwin Seba
HOUSTON (Reuters) -TotalEnergies’ 238,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, is operating at minimal production as it contends with multiple upsets on Wednesday, people familiar with plant operations said.
The refinery has been struggling to complete a restart following a Jan. 16 plant-wide power outage after temperatures fell below 20 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 7 degrees Celsius).
Company spokesperson Marie Maitre declined to comment on refinery operations.
On Wednesday, the company reported multiple upsets in heaters for the refinery’s 150,000-bpd ACU-1 and 40,000-bpd ACU-2 crude distillation units along with the 51,000-bpd and 60,000-bpd vacuum distillation units as well as the 60,000-bpd DCU-2 coker were affected by the Wednesday malfunction, according to the TCEQ filing.
CDUs break down crude oil into feedstocks for all other units while VDUs further refine gunky residual crude oil from CDUs into feedstocks for other units.
The coker finishes the refining of crude oil by converting residual crude from the VDU into motor fuel feedstocks or petroleum coke.
The refinery’s 76,000-bpd fluidic catalytic cracker-2 was also in operation, according to the sources.
(Reporting by Erwin Seba; Editing by Chris Reese, Josie Kao and Sherry Jacob-Phillips)
A refinery is an industrial facility where crude oil is processed and transformed into usable products such as gasoline, diesel, and other petrochemicals.
Crude oil is a naturally occurring, unrefined petroleum product composed of hydrocarbon deposits and other organic materials, which can be refined into various fuels and chemicals.
Distillation units are industrial equipment used in refineries to separate crude oil into different components based on their boiling points, producing various fuels and chemicals.
A power outage is a temporary loss of electrical power in a specific area, which can disrupt operations in facilities such as refineries and other industrial plants.
A coker is a type of unit in a refinery that converts heavy crude oil residues into lighter products like gasoline and diesel through a process called coking.
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