Shell Australia works toward Clyde refinery restart later in July

Shell Australia is working towards restarting its 86,000 barrel per day (bpd) refinery at Clyde in the east coast city of Sydney later in July, company spokesman Paul Zennaro said. The refinery was temporarily shut by Shell in November 2008 to enable work to address unplanned outages, which had dogged the facility for the previous 12 months. At the time, Caplan said he was hopeful the refinery would be up and running some time around July. 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 standard of 10 parts per million (ppm) sulfur in diesel. The standard came into effect on January 1, 2009, lowering the allowed sulfur content in diesel from the previous 50 ppm. When it closed the refinery last year, Shell declined to forecast the likely length of the shutdown, saying only that the plant would not restart until it could be assured of operating safely, reliably and sustainably. Clyde has had at times an uncertain future, and had been earmarked for closure in 2001 ahead of major investment required to enable it to meet new clean fuel standards. (July 1, 2009)