CALGARY, Alberta, Aug 31 – Canadian Oil Sands Trust said on Thursday that an upgrading refinery at Syncrude Canada Ltd.’s Fort McMurray, Alberta, oil sands operations has been restarted after regulators closed it in May because of odors.
The trust, the largest shareholder in the Syncrude joint venture, said tar-like bitumen which is mined from the sands, began being fed into a new coker unit on Wednesday and production will be ramped up slowly.
Siren Fisekci, a spokeswoman for the trust, said the coker is now producing 25,000 barrels of synthetic crude a day. Output will then be boosted to 65,000 barrels a day and then to design capacity of 100,000 barrels a day. However, she said there was no fixed timetable for increasing output.
“We don’t know when we reach each point. It depends on how the operation is going,” Fisekci said. “We can’t reliably say what rates will be at any point.”
The unit is part of an C$8.4 billion ($7.6 billion) expansion of the project that will boost output from the site by 100,000 barrels a day to 350,000 bpd.
Alberta environmental regulators ordered the unit shut in May, 10 days after it had been started up. The order came after area residents complained of urine-like odors being emitted from a flue gas desulphurization unit, which treats gas emitted from the coker.
The trust said an investigation had found that ammonia produced on site and used in the unit contained impurities responsible for the smells.
Syncrude will now import ammonia at a cost of C$3 million a month.
Canadian Oil Sands Trust owns a 35.5 percent share in Syncrude. Its partners include Canadian Oil Sands Investments Inc. Imperial Oil Ltd., Petro-Canada, ConocoPhillips, Nexen Inc., Nippon Oil Corp.unit Mocal Energy Ltd. and Murphy Oil Corp.
(Reuters)
-Faruq Masad
