Hovensa’s fluid catalytic cracking unit, out of service since a Dec. 9 mechanical failure, came back online Christmas Eve and is slowly building up to its regular production level, according to the refinery. A Dec. 9 hydrocarbon release, which lasted about eight minutes and was carried northwest of the refinery by prevailing winds, was unrelated to the cracker unit, according to Hovensa. (For more details about the release, see link at story’s end.)
According to Hovensa, the release was caused by the malfunction of a valve on a processing unit. The fluid catalytic cracking unit uses heat, pressure and chemicals that act as catalysts to break down, or “crack,” long hydrocarbon molecules in crude oil that would otherwise be thick, heavy oils and convert them in to the shorter, more volatile compounds that make up gasoline.
This allows the refinery to produce more gasoline and less heavy oils from the same volume of crude oil.
The cracker, which was completed in 1993, has a 150,000 barrels-per-day capacity, according to Hovensa spokesman Alex Moorhead, and accounts for more than a quarter of the refinery’s total output. The cracker is being brought up to capacity gradually.
This is not the first time Hovensa’s cracker has been offline this year. According to the EIA, Hovensa shut the unit Oct. 6, citing precautionary reasons after a weather-induced electrical malfunction, and by Oct. 13 was again “nearing normal operations.” Moorhead declined to offer more detail on the cracker repairs, but he has previously said the refinery cannot afford to have the cracker offline for long periods because it loses money when the cracker is down, so getting the unit back online must be welcome news at the refinery.
When it went offline, U.S. gas prices abruptly shot up several cents in response, according to reports from the Platts energy information clearing house and Bloomberg news.
One of the largest refineries in the world, Hovensa can refine roughly half a million barrels per day and is the second-largest source of refined gasoline imported into the continental U.S., after Canada, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a component of the U.S. Department of Energy.
Editor’s Note; According to Moorhead, the Dec. 9 shut down of Hovensa’s catalytic cracker was unrelated to the Dec. 9 valve failure which resulted in an airborne release of hydrocarbons.
