Wuhan refinery completes 1st phase of expansion

Sinopec Corp., Asia’s biggest oil refiner, announced the completion of work on a 1.9 million ton per year (tpy) hydro-treating unit for diesel fuel and kerosene at its Wuhan refinery. The unit forms the first phase of an 8 million tpy expansion of its Wuhan refinery, involving a capital outlay of 4 billion yuan (US$587 million). With this, the crude processing capacity of Wuhan refinery has been increased by 30%, to 130,000 barrels per day (bpd). Three other facilities, also forming a part of the first phase of the expansion project, namely, a 100,000 bpd crude unit, a 1.2 million tpy delayed coking unit and a 60,000 tpy sulfur recovery unit, have also been commissioned. In the second phase, a two million tpy hydrocracker unit is to be built, which would take the total crude processing capacity of the Wuhan refinery to 160,000 bpd by 2010. The expanded refinery would supply naphtha to an 800,000 tpy ethylene complex worth US$2 billion, which is being built by Sinopec at the same site that SK Energy has agreed to buy a 35% stake in the ethylene project. (June 27, 2008)