Venezuela’s state oil and gas company PDVSA has restarted gasoline production at the country’s second largest refinery after repairing a breakdown, five sources with knowledge of the operation said on Monday, August 22.
The Cardon refinery’s naphtha reformer, with a capacity of 45,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd), produces high-octane components for gasoline and is key to the country’s gasoline supply.
PDVSA commissioned it with an output of about 28,000 bpd around August 9. The reformer “is already producing”, one source stated.
The reformer suspended production at the end of June to undergo maintenance that extended beyond the 21 days originally scheduled.
Another source said: “We are producing 28,000 b/d (barrels per day) of pure lomito (high-grade gasoline) of 102 octane.”
But Cardon’s 88,000 bpd capacity Fluidised Catalytic Cracking (FCC) unit remains stalled, the sources said.
A restart would provide relief to ongoing supply failures in the nation, whose 1.3 million bpd grid has been crippled by years of disinvestment and lack of maintenance.
The Amuay refinery and Cardon make up the Paraguana Refining Center in the western state of Falcon, which has a combined production capacity of 955,000 bpd. At Amuay, the catalytic cracker was operational.
The El Palito refinery on the country’s central coast, the smallest in the Venezuelan refining circuit, halted gasoline production at the end of 2021.
In May, an agreement was made between Iran’s state-owned National Iranian Oil Engineering and Construction Company and Venezuela to repair the refinery.
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