Fire crews are attempting to extinguish a pile of smoldering petroleum coke at the shuttered St Croix refinery in the US Virgin Islands, the facility's owner Port Hamilton (PHRT) said.
The fire started on 4 August and "water has been applied 24 hours a day and the temperature readings inside the coke dome are being monitored," PHRT said.
The material was left when the refinery's previous owners US firm Limetree Bay refining hurriedly shut the plant in May 2021.
This followed a shutdown order of the 200,000 b/d facility from the EPA because of coker accidents that caused oil to be sprayed on neighbouring communities.
PHRT, a domestic start-up, won a December 2021 auction in a Texas bankruptcy court with a $62mn bid for the refinery.
"Heavy equipment is being utilized to move the petroleum coke material inside the dome so the water can reach below the surface of the pile to safely suppress the smoldering coke," PHRT said. "To keep all employees safe, the process must be done at a slow, controlled pace."
Port Hamilton is delivering "routine updates" on its progress in dousing the smoldering material to the territory's department of planning and natural resources and EPA, it said.
PHRT plans to restart the refinery in the second quarter of 2023, targeting output of 180,000 b/d, the company said last month.
The facility will be restarted "in a safe and environmentally conscious way" and could ease the tight demand for petroleum products on the US mainland, PHRT chief executive Charles Chambers said.
But the EPA will move cautiously in examining Port Hamilton's plan for restarting the facility, the agency's administrator Michael Regan said last month.
"That refinery's record speaks for itself, raining oil on the very communities it claims to provide jobs for and serve," he said. "I don't feel any pressure to let any refinery or any facility cheat at the expense of the communities they are supposed to serve."
The refinery had an original design capacity of 525,000 b/d and was previously owned by Hovensa, a joint venture between Venezuelan state-owned PdV and US independent Hess that shut the facility in 2012.
