The explosion, which occurred during the preparation of resuming operations at the 100,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery after maintenance, resulted in damage of one of the walls of the furnace used in the production of gasoline, but had no impact on the refinery’s crude distillation unit (CDU).
The fire department has ordered the company to suspend all the operations at the refinery as the repair work will take at least 30 days.
Commenting on the incident, Nansei Sekiyu was quoted by Reuters as saying that on account of the circumstances, resumption of refining operations will be postponed for a while.
The fire department, however, said the timing of restart of the refinery remains unclear.
Wholly-owned by Brazilian oil and gas firm Petrobras, the refinery was scheduled to resume operations on 20 July 2013, following the repair of the refinery from a fire accident that occurred on 6 June 2013.
