May 30 (SeeNews) - Romania's top oil and gas group OMV Petrom [BSE:SNP] said its Petrobrazi refinery has resumed operations following a turnaround which required a 45 million euro ($52 million) investment.
Works lasted for approximately six weeks and consisted of maintenance and modernization, inspection and verification of facilities as well as investments in a series of the main units of the refinery in Ploiesti, OMV Petrom said in a statement on Tuesday.
”Our facilities are currently 100% available as we restarted the production of refined products one unit at a time. After restart, we are fully operational and able to process more than 12,000 tonnes of crude per day”,OMV Petrom executive board member and responsible for downstream oil operations, Neil Anthony Morgan, said.
Over 5,000 workers were involved in the turnaround, 4,000 more than during normal operation. They inspected some 3,720 pipelines and 9,300 pieces of electronic and automation equipment.
Following completion of the modernization works planned for this year, the mean time between turnarounds will increase to four years, with the next turnaround scheduled for 2022. Before 2014, turnarounds of this type were performed annually and, after the finalization of Petrobrazi modernization programme, the mean time between turnarounds was extended to two years.
The 45 million euro investment ads up to more than 1.5 billion euro already invested in the modernization of Petrobrazi between 2005 and 2017.
Petrobrazi refinery, with an annual refining capacity of 4.5 million tonnes of crude oil, is one of the most important units of this profile in Romania. The Petrobrazi output can meet the fuel demand of 3 million cars per year.
Shares of blue chip OMV Petrom traded 1.45% lower at 0.3055 lei as at 0927 CET on Wednesday on the Bucharest Stock Exchange.
($=0.8682 euro)