CALGARY, Alberta, Dec 12 (Reuters) – A major processing unit at the Syncrude Canada oil sands venture will undergo a maintenance turnaround more than half a year ahead of schedule, Syncrude’s largest interest owner said on Tuesday.
Canadian Oil Sands Trust (COS_u.TO: Quote, Profile , Research) said a coker unit, called 8-2, will be offline for about 1-1/2 months, resulting in the loss of 2 million-3 million barrels of production.Syncrude started maintenance on the unit, which upgrades the tar-like crude from the oil sands into synthetic oil, in late November. It finished the repairs but had problems restarting the unit, the trust said.
The venture operators decided a complete outage was needed to clean the unit’s internal coke deposit before it can go back into service. The outage is expected to last until late January.The work will cost C$40 million to C$50 million ($35 million to $43 million), the trust said.
The next major turnaround on the unit was scheduled for the third quarter of 2007 and Canadian Oil Sands said it may still have to shut it down again next autumn.The outage is not expected to reduce the trust’s production target for Syncrude in 2006 of 95 million barrels and for 2007 of 110 million barrels, it said.Syncrude Canada, located north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, is the world’s largest producer of synthetic crude oil.
Canadian Oil Sands’ partners are Imperial Oil Ltd., Petro-Canada, ConocoPhillips, Nexen Inc., Nippon Oil Corp. unit Mocal Energy Ltd. and Murphy Oil Corp.
