Neste Oil Corp. has completed a 2-month planned maintenance turnaround at its 10.5 million-tonne/year Porvoo refinery in the Kilpilahti Industrial Area, about 20 miles east of Helsinki, Finland.
Start-up activities proceeded as planned, and production at the refinery has resumed, Neste Oil said.
The company plans to reach normal utilization rates at Porvoo within a few days.
The scheduled turnaround, the largest in Porvoo’s history, began in April and was designed to ensure the refinery’s optimized performance and safety for the next 4-6 years, the company said (OGJ Online, Mar. 23, 2015).
With strong refining markets in this year’s second quarter, slight delays to work on some units during the turnaround period likely will result in a loss of about €130 million to the company’s operating profit for the quarter compared with an expected loss of about €100 million prior to the maintenance shutdown, Neste Oil said.
The negative impact to quarterly profits, however, should not impact the company’s full-year 2015 comparable operating profit, which Neste Oil said it still expects to be higher than that achieved during 2014.
The refinery’s major turnaround, which occurs once every 5 years, included work associated with Neste Oil’s previously announced €500 million investment plan to closely integrate refinery operations at its Porvoo and 3 million-tpy Naantali refineries to help keep the company’s European operations competitive (OGJ Online, Oct. 7, 2014).
Contact Robert Brelsford at [email protected].
