PetroChina's Daqing refinery expands capacity to 200,000 bpd
PetroChina’s Daqing refinery has expanded its crude oil processing capacity to 10 million tons per year, or 200,000 barrels per day, from 6.5 million, after completing a two-year upgrade.
The refinery in China’s northeastern province of Heilongjiang also revamped its 1.2 million tons hydrocracker and 1.2 million gasoline and diesel hydrotreating units.
With total investment of 4.45 billion yuan ($651 million), Daqing also added a series of facilities, such as a 2 million tons per year fluid catalytic cracker, a 600,000 tons per year gas fractionation unit and two 20,000 tons per year sulfur recovery units.
The upgrade allows the refinery to process 3.5 million tons of Russian ESPO Blend crude oil annually, on top of its current refining capacity of 6.5 million tons of local Daqing crude.
“(The upgrade project) will help Daqing refinery to break the bottleneck of development, to adjust structure of units and products, and to improve risk resistance capacity as well as improve profitability,” parent China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) said in a statement.
The city of Daqing, home to the refinery and China’s largest oilfield by production, said this year it planned to embark on a five-year plan to expand oil refining and high-value added petrochemical production.
The refinery is expected to produce 180,000 tons of propylene, 260,000 tons of liquid hydrocarbon, 220,000 tons of toluene and 280,000 of xylene to supply chemical plants in the region.
($1=6.8349 Chinese yuan renminbi)
Reporting by Muyu Xu in Beijing and Shu Zhang in Singapore; Editing by Clarence Fernandez
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