Indian Oil shuts Gujarat FCCU on tech snag-sources

NEW DELHI, July 9 (Reuters) - Indian Oil Corp (IOC.BO) has shut a fluid catalytic cracker unit (FCCU) since Wednesday at its refinery in western Gujarat state due to a technical snag, company officials and trade sources said on Thursday.

The 274,000 bpd Koyali plant in Gujarat is IOC's biggest refinery and has one FCCU with an annual capacity of 1.8 million tonnes.

"Yes, our FCCU at Koyali is down since yesterday. We hope it should be fixed in about 7-10 days but it all depends on the job to be done," said an IOC official, who did not want to be identified.

Another IOC official confirmed there was an emergency shutdown of FCCU at the IOC refinery and the company had cut crude runs following the outage.

A source familiar with the matter said IOC had already indicated to trader Itochu about a possible delay in loading of July second-half naphtha cargo from Dahej if the shutdown was extended.

Currently, planned maintenance work is on in some of the units in the Koyali refinery.

No immediate comment was available from IOC and Itochu.

IOC was scheduled to shut down the FCCU for planned maintenance in August-September. For a table on planned maintenance work at IOC's refinery see: [ID:nDEL492191]

The unexpected shutdown happened at a time when the Asian naphtha market is grappling with tight spot supplies. Although at least 500,000 tonnes of Western naphtha have been booked for August arrival in the region, traders expect the supply crunch to persist until end August.

The Asian naphtha crack spreads, the premiums/losses obtained from refining Brent crude, were at $92.10 a tonne premium on Thursday, up by about 77 percent from a month ago. (Additional Reporting by Seng Li Peng in SINGAPORE) (Reporting by Nidhi Verma; Editing by John Mair)