I am of the view that the cost of starting back up the refinery is prohibitive.
I say so because this refinery was not properly shut down because of the timeframe given for the shut down was too short and proper mothballing procedures were not followed.
1. The columns and vessels were not properly slip blanked and purged with nitrogen to eliminate any oxygen being trapped in the vessels therefore a lot of rust and deterioration of the trays and bubble caps in these columns would be in a bad state of decomposition.
2. the tanks in the tank farms are in a very dilapidated state, again with corrosion taking place in all the metal sheeting and in some cases the roofs are collapsing
3. I heard that they plan to open the refinery in stages, in my view, that will not be possible as the refinery is like an assembly line where each feed stock for the plants have to come from the fractionation of the crude oil into the various hydrocarbons that are needed to supply the other plants and if for example the fractionation units are started up the light hydrocarbons produced from the top of the columns cannot be stored and have to either be flared or supplied to the other units which has to be started up in order to use the feed stock.
4. All the transport pipes required to send the hydrocarbons to the different plants and storage tanks and shipping facilities are in a terrible state of disrepair having bee dormant for the last seven years and a lot of leaks will occur causing serious fire hazards
5. Thousands of pumps that are required to transport the hydrocarbons to different areas of the refinery. In most cases have to be replaced again due to deterioration
6. Getting competent personnel to operate the refinery will be a serious challenge because of the unavailability of the skilled labour required and the operators will have to recruit hundreds of people to be trained in refining, again this is a very costly exercise.
Due to the above I am of the view that a more profitable venture would be to scrap the refinery, sell the steel to china india etc and a modern refinery could be built at a considerably lower cost, occupy less space and it won’t require the number of personnel to operate, an advantage to having a refinery in this location is the port facilities for shipping and receiving product.
These smaller refineries are modern package units which are much easier to operate and are extremely efficient.
A former Senior Refinery Operator
