Update on fire at Shell Bukom refinery

UPDATE 1-One of 3 crude units still down a day after outage at Shell Singapore plant
* 2 crude units restarted on the same day
* 3rd unit still down due to fire investigation
* Expected to restart in a day or 2
Yaw Yan Chong Reuters 27 Mar 12;

Tue Mar 27, 2012 10:51am BST

SINGAPORE, March 27 (Reuters) - One of three Crude Distillation Units (CDUs) at Royal Dutch Shell's 500,000 barrels-per-day (bpd) Singapore refinery, its largest in the world, is still down a day after an outage that caused the plant to be shut for a few hours, industry sources said on Tuesday.

The outage occurred after electricity supply to the plant tripped momentarily, called a power dip, triggering a fire in one of the smaller secondary cracking units, part of its 33,000-bpd Long Residue Catalytic Cracker (LRCC) complex.

A Shell spokesperson could not be immediately reached for comment.

The fire, which occurred at one of the flanges of the secondary unit and put out shortly after, forced the shut down of the plant's three CDUs.

Two were restarted by the end of Monday, and the third is expected to be restarted in a day or two. Disruptions to supply of oil products are expected to be minimal, as the oil major usually keeps sufficient buffer stocks.

"The third CDU is still down because it is connected to the unit where the fire occurred, and investigations are going on to find out exactly why the flange caught fire," one of the sources said.

"Compared to the fire in September, this outage is small, despite the necessity of shutting the plant down. There should not be any disruptions to Shell's supplies as they would have enough buffer to cover the shutdown."

In September, the plant was shut for two to four weeks following a major fire that forced the oil major to declare a force majeure on the sales of some of its oil products and some of its crude purchases.

Although all three CDUs were restarted by end-October, about a month after the fire, the plant has not been running at full trot, and is operating at under 80 percent, due to extensive repairs to its delivery system for clean oil products, the area where the fire occurred.

The sources said it was unlikely the current outage had anything to do with the previous fire, pointing out that the fire this time was a result of the power dip.

There have been problems with power supply to the plant, delivered from mainland Singapore onto the offshore Bukom island where it is located, they added.

"The staff has been careful with how much power they were using for the plant because of the issues. There are protocols in place on how to deal with such power trips, but the fire was unexpected," another source said. (Reporting by Yaw Yan Chong; Editing by Sugita Katyal)