Cosmo Oil boosts delayed coker capacity at Sakai refinery

Japan’s Cosmo Oil raised production capacity of its delayed coker at the Sakai refinery by 100,000 barrels per day, thus likely enabling the refiner to meet the new standard set by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), requiring oil refiners to raise its crude distillation unit’s (CDU) residue cracking ratio by 15% to 45%.
A company source said, “If it is not enough to simply raise the coker’s capacity like we did to meet the standard, we will have to consider other choices such as reducing refining capacities. At this moment we have so far heard nothing from METI against such measures of ours, and at this moment we consider the issue as virtually solved, having no plan to take any additional measures.”
As required by the regulation enacted in July 2010, Cosmo reported to METI on February 1, 2013, that it raised production capacity of the coker from 25,000 bpd to 29,000 bpd to meet the new standard.
Cosmo was not sure whether the measures they undertook to raise the coker’s capacity would comply with the new regulations, since they just made the minimum investment to begin with. It may be necessary later to substantially modify facilities or construct new ones to increase productivity.
The Cosmo source further said, “As a matter of fact, we already made a large investment of over JPY100 billion (USD1.01 billion) to the new construction of the delayed coker. This time, our investment was just for increasing the capacity to some extent to meet the standard.”
Considering the fact that Cosmo’s delayed coker has been running at a high operational rate and that the regulation requires refineries to take necessary measures before the end of March 2014, it is likely that METI will deem the company’s measures as acceptable under the regulation.
(July 16, 2013)