OMV Petrom SA, Bucharest, has commissioned a railway section for transporting fuel production inside its 4.5-million tonne/year Petrobrazi refinery in the southeast region of Romania, near Ploiesti City.
Built near the refinery’s delayed coking unit, the 1.4-km railway extension interconnects with four other existing tracks of the production site’s now nearly 50-km interior railway system to enable easier maneuvering of railcars, the operator said.
Completed at an investment of about €1.7 million, the new railway section comes as part of a strategy to further improve safety and reduce operating costs at the refinery by optimizing fuel-loading logistics, according to Neil Anthony Morgan, OMV Petrom’s executive board member responsible for downstream operations.
The Petrobrazi refinery ships more than 50,000 railcars/year of finished products along the interior railway, which links to the public network for transport to distribution terminals and on to filling stations.
OMV Petrom has invested more than €50 million in modernizing about 75% of the refinery’s rail system during the past decade, the company said.
Unit progress
Separately, construction will begin this year at the Petrobrazi refinery on a grassroots Polyfuel unit designed to convert LPG components into Euro 5-quality gasoline and middle distillates (OGJ Online, Dec. 21, 2016).
To be based on the first commercial use of Axen SA’s proprietary PolyFuel technology, the unit will maximize production of diesel using a feedstock of LPGs and light-cracked naphtha from the refinery’s fluid catalytic cracking unit.
The €60-million project will include three main reactors, several adsorbers, as well as columns and pumps, and is scheduled to be fully commissioned by first-half 2019, OMV Petrom said.
Contact Robert Brelsford at [email protected].