Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Secondary Containment Halts Greka Facility Oil/Water Spill


Approximately 250 barrels of mostly produced water and crude oil spilled at the Greka Oil Lease facility in Santa Maria, according to the Santa Barbara County Fire Department.
Representatives from Greka, the fire department, the Department of Fish and Game, and County Petroleum responded to the scene at 9:16 a.m.
Crews say the spill was a result of an over-filled produced water tank. The spill did not affect local wildlife, and was within secondary containment, according to the fire department.

Special thanks to KSBY News for reporting.

Friday, May 07, 2010

Shell Singapore Cracker Unit Utilizes Earth Shield Waterstop for Containment Needs



BANGALORE, INDIA--May 7, 2010--Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Global oil and gas major Royal Dutch Shell plc (NYSE:RDS.A) (The Hague, Netherlands) inaugurated its widely anticipated Shell Eastern Petrochemical Complex (SEPC) in Singapore on May 4. At the inaugural ceremony, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsieng Loong said that the complex, which is Shell's new petrochemical hub, could attract a "new wave" of investments in excess of $2 billion in fixed assets from major companies involved in the petrochemical industry.

The SEPC is expected to give a major boost to Singapore's chemicals sector, which is responsible for one-third, or $60 billion, of the country's total manufacturing capacity. In fact, the company itself is attempting to lift its capacity to meet the burgeoning Asian, especially Chinese, demand for plastic-making raw materials.

The pride of the project is a cracker, which has a manufacturing capacity of 800,000 ton per year of ethylene; 450,000 tons per year of propylene; and 230,000 tons per year of benzene. Shell already had commissioned its 800,000 tons per year ethylene cracker on Pulau Bukom Island in March and the facility is operating efficiently, without hiccups, it is reported.

The complex also has a strategic integration with a 500,000-barrel-per-day refinery at Bukom Island. Shell modified the Bukom refinery plant, by virtue of which it is now capable of manufacturing a larger gamut of crudes as raw materials for the cracker.

Last November, the company had also commissioned its 750,000-ton-per-year mono ethylene glycol (MEG) plant on Jurong Island.

While designing the new complex, Shell wanted to have both the oil refining and the petrochemical units in the same complex, linking the facilities on the two islands. The cracker on Bukom Island, integrated with the Bukom refinery, is linked to the facilities on Jurong Island by a series of 2.8-mile pipes on the seabed. The company has provisions to either cool the ethylene to a liquid form for the purpose of exporting it from a newly constructed jetty, or to store it in a terminal with cryogenic storage provisions.



Special thanks to industrial info.com for reporting the story. ---David R. Poole