Crude, power, water shortages cut Amuay units

Venezuelan state-owned PdV's 635,000 b/d Amuay refinery is operating at only 20pc of nameplate capacity after crude, power and water supply shortages forced the shutdown of its catalytic cracker and a distillation unit, two oil union officials tell Argus.

Amuay refinery's 104,000 b/d fluidized catalytic cracker has been offline since 23 June after power and crude supply shortages triggered equipment failures that forced an emergency shutdown, a senior official of the federation of oil unions (Futpv) said today.

The refinery's distillation unit No 5 shut down on 26 June because of the shortage, reducing the refinery's operational capacity to 130,000 b/d, a second Futpv official said.

Amuay and the nearby 305,000 b/d Cardon refinery comprise the CRP refining complex on the Paraguana peninsula, which PdV operates as an integrated complex.

A senior Futpv official said operational problems at Amuay and Cardon worsened during the first six months of 2018 as frequent crude processing unit breakdowns were aggravated by growing shortages of crude, power and water needed to generate steam.

The CRP's 300MW integrated power generation facility, which supplies electricity to both refineries, is "in a critical state operationally because PdV and (state-owned power company) Corpoelec no longer have the financial and technical capability to maintain thermal power generation units in acceptable operating condition," another Futpv official said.

PdV denied the claims by oil union officials of new problems at the Amuay refinery. "The CRP's refineries are operating normally," a PdV media official in Caracas said.

But a downstream executive in Caracas tells Argus that PdV's ongoing problems at the CRP refining complex — which has suffered over 100 crude processing equipment breakdowns, fires and explosions in the past six years — have forced the postponement of plans to start refining foreign crude for the first time ever in order to fulfill supply contracts with Chinese, Indian and Russian clients.

The PdV downstream executive blamed the CRP's unresolved operational problems on a combination of unqualified operators and "very frequent interruptions" in supplies.

PdV's refineries in Venezuela currently are operating at about one-third of their combined 1.3mn b/d nameplate processing capacity, processing some 390,000 b/d of crude, the downstream executive said.