BP says to restart Texas City refinery ultracracker
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil major BP (BP.L) will restart on Friday an ultracracker at its Texas City, Texas, oil refinery, after it had an unplanned shutdown a day earlier, the company said in a filing with state regulators.
The brief outage at the gasoline-related unit, which followed a snag, had no impact to production at the refinery, a source familiar with the refinery operations told Reuters.
"It was just a 24-hour thing, they saw a reading that they did not like so they took the unit off-line for 24 hours but they are restarting it today," the source said. "There was no impact to production, it was very short-lived."
The ultracracker was shut Thursday after a lube oil turbine trip, BP reported in an earlier filing on Friday. The loss of the lube oil turbine caused the ultracracker to become unstable, forcing an emergency shutdown, it added.
"The ultracracker will be starting up after an emergency unit shutdown," BP said in another filing on Friday with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. "Operations will be directing most of the emissions generated from the unit start-up to the fuel gas system."
The ultracracker has a capacity of 60,0000 barrels per day and makes high-octane blending components for gasoline. The refinery has a total capacity of 460,000 bpd but has been running at lower rates as it recovers from a rapid shutdown in September 2005 when Hurricane Rita menaced Texas City.
