Motiva, two other east Texas refineries return to normal operations
Motiva Enterprises' 640,500 barrel-per-day (bpd) Port Arthur, Texas refinery along with two others in the east Texas Gulf Coast city were operating normally after recovering from malfunctions, said people familiar with plant operations.
The Motiva refinery, which is the nation's largest by capacity, and Valero Energy's 380,000 bpd Port Arthur refinery sustained multiple unit malfunctions on October 26 because they lost nitrogen gas supply from a plant in Louisiana, sources at the two plants said.
TotalEnergies 238,000 bpd Port Arthur refinery sustained a boiler outage on October 26, causing the refinery to lose steam supply needed for electrical power production and in refining crude, sources familiar with the plant's operations said.
TotalEnergies spokesperson Marie Maitre declined to discuss operations at the refinery.
Spokespeople from Motiva and Valero did not reply to requests for comment.
The Motiva refinery on October 27 restarted units knocked out by the nitrogen supply outage, the sources said.
The Valero refinery's units restarted on Tuesday, the sources said.
Units at the TotalEnergies refinery were back in operation by mid-week, the sources said.
The TotalEnergies disruption came days after the refinery had finished restarting the small crude distillation unit (CDU) along with others after completing a planned two-month overhaul, the sources said.
TotalEnergies TTEF.PA began the overhaul in mid August on the 35,000-bpd continuous catalytic reformer (CCR), three diesel hydrotreaters with a combined throughput of 84,000 bpd, along with a 42,000-bpd naphtha hydrotreater and a sulfur block along with the 40,000-bpd ACU-2 CDU and its associated 51,000-bpd vacuum distillation unit-1 (VDU-1), the sources said.
The 150,000-bpd ACU-1 CDU remained in operation while ACU-2 was shut.
CDUs operate at atmospheric pressure and break down crude oil into feedstocks for all other units at the refinery.
VDUs also break down crude oil into feedstocks, but operate at vacuum pressure.
Reformers convert refining byproducts in octane-boosting components added to unfinished gasoline.
Hydrotreaters remove sulfur from motor fuels and their feedstocks to comply with U.S. environmental rules.
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