PetroChina adds refining facilities for Russian oil

BEIJING, July 16 (Reuters) - Asia's top oil and gas company PetroChina (0857.HK)(601857.SS) has started an expansion of its Liaoyang refinery in northeastern China to prepare for more oil imports from Russia, its parent CNPC said in a company newspaper.

Liaoyang is the main plant in China for processing Russian oil.

Liaoyang will add a hydrocracking unit with capacity of 1 million tonnes per year (tpy), a hydrorefining unit of 2 million tpy and a sulphur removing and recovering unit of 30,000 tpy, as well as other facilities including reserve tanks.

All construction work would be completed before the end of 2010, the China Petroleum Daily reported on Thursday. It did not disclose the investment involved.

In March, the general manager of the plant said Liaoyang planned 110,000 bpd of crude throughput for 2009.

The plant has a crude processing capacity of nearly 200,000 barrels per day (bpd), data published on CNPC's website showed.

According to an oil-for-loan deal between China and Russia agreed in April, about 15 million tonnes of Russian crude oil will be sent to China every year from 2011 upon completion of a pipeline, scheduled for October 2010.

China imported 11.6 million tonnes of crude oil, mostly via rail, from Russia in 2008, down 20 percent from a year earlier, Chinese customs data showed. (Reporting by Jim Bai and Chen Aizhu; Editing by Chris Lewis)