Shell Australia to restart Clyde refinery

Shell Australia is working towards restarting its 86,000 barrel per day refinery at Clyde in the east coast city of Sydney in July, Chairman Russell Caplan said. The Clyde refinery was temporarily shut by Shell in November 2008 to address unplanned outages, which had dogged the facility for the previous 12 months. The plant and Gore Bay terminal on Sydney harbor have since been operating as an import facility. The shutdown also coincided with planned work on Clyde’s hydro-desulfurization unit, which is being modified to enable the refinery to meet the new Australian fuel standard. The standard, which came into effect on January 1, 2009, lowered the maximum allowable sulfur content in diesel fuel from 50 parts per million (ppm) to 10 ppm. (May 5, 2009)