Vietnam Dung Quat refinery to shut 2-3 weeks
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Dung Quat oil refinery, Vietnam's first facility of its type, will shut down from Wednesday for equipment checks, prompting domestic distributors to seek imports of an additional 400,000 tonnes of oil products, an executive said on Monday.
The 130,500 barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery, will cease all operations for between two and three weeks as part of a maintenance plan, Nguyen Hoai Giang, chief executive of Binh Son Refining and Petrochemical Co, which runs Dung Quat, told Reuters.
During the shutdown, engineers will check for equipment to be replaced or repaired when the facility is shut again for two months of summer maintenance, Giang said. Distributors will have to import mostly gasoline and liquefied petroleum gas, he added.
The $3-billion facility on the coast 880 kilometres (550 miles) south of Hanoi, will shut down from mid-July to mid-September for its first scheduled maintenance after more than a year of official operation.
Top distributor Petrolimex has plans and is in negotiations with partners for the necessary imports, said Vuong Thai Dung, Petrolimex's deputy chief executive officer. He declined to give details.
Dung Quat has received three 80,000-tonne cargoes of sweet crude from BP so far this year and will select a contractor for the maintenance next week, said Giang, the refinery executive.
The facility's expansion plan to raise the capacity to 200,000 bpd will be completed in April instead of this month as planned, he added.
