DMEA: Challenges and progress

This week’s DMEA covers the outbreak of a fire at Kuwait’s second-largest refinery and a contract award for a new refining unit in Egypt.

Downstream-focused Kuwait National Petroleum Co. (KNPC) reported an explosion and fire at the country’s Mina Al-Ahmadi refinery which injured several workers but did not affect operations.

Speaking to state-owned Kuwait TV, KNPC’s executive vice president of support services, Abdulaziz Al-Duaij, said that firefighters were working to normalise the situation. “The refinery operations and export operations were not affected and there has been no impact to local marketing operations and supplies to the electricity and water ministry,” he said.

Via its Twitter account, KNPC said: “A number of minor injuries and cases of suffocation as a result of inhalation of fumes occurred among the contractor’s workers. First aid was provided to the injured on the site, and they are all in good condition. Others were transferred to Al-Adan Hospital and their condition is stable.”

Alongside the larger Mina Abdullah unit, the refinery was the focus of the Clean Fuels Project (CFP), a $15.6bn programme to increase throughput capacity at facilities to 454,000 barrels per day and 346,000 bpd respectively, while improving environmental performance and facilitating the production of cleaner fuels in line with Euro-IV and Euro-V standards. Kuwait Petroleum Corp. (KPC) subsidiary KNPC launched full operations on the CFP last month following a lengthy development process.

Meanwhile, Egypt’s Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources announced that the Assiut National Oil Processing Co. (ANOPC) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with two local firms for the development of a new atmospheric distillation unit (ADU).

The $382mn deal was signed with contractors Engineering for Petroleum and Process Industries (ENPPI) and Petroleum Projects and Technical Consultations Co. (Petrojet), which will construct the facility with a processing capacity of 100,000 bpd of crude at the Assiut refinery around 400 km south of Cairo. The facility is the main supplier of fuel to Upper Egypt.

The MoU was signed by Majid Al-Kurdi head of ASORC, Enppi’s chairman and CEO Ashraf Bahaa, and Petrojet’s chairman Waleed Lotfy, in the presence of Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Tarek el Molla.