OREANDA-NEWS. March 21, 2012. Rustam Minnikhanov, President of the Republic of Tatarstan, visited the Complex of refineries and petrochemical plants (NPiNHZ) in Nizhnekamsk (Tatarstan), reported the press-centre of TATNEFT.

During the working visit Rustam Minnikhanov was accompanied by Rinat Sabirov, Assistant to President of Tatarstan, Shafagat Takhautdinov, General Director of TATNEFT, Boris Petrov, Head of the Volga Administration of Rostekhnadzor, Aydar Metshin, Head of the Nizhnekamsk Municipal District and heads of contracting construction, design and commissioning organizations.

The delegation got acquainted with the progress of construction work at a combined hydrocracking installation. Reports on the current situation were presented to the President by the heads of contracting organizations "Neftegasengineering", "Kamgesenergostroy", "Glavneftegazstroyservis" and "Tatelectromontazh" involved in the project.

Mansour Kalimullin, Chief Engineer of the refinery informed about peculiarities of the production process of the sulfur production unit of TANECO, where commissioning operations are underway at present. The installation has been designed to extract the hydrogen sulfide from petroleum refined products and obtain granular elemental sulfur. Advanced technologies and modern equipment implemented at TANECO allow achieving a serious effect in terms of resource and energy saving and environmental conservation.

The ecology topic was continued in the operator room and the laboratory of the NPiNHZ Complex treatment facilities, where the delegation familiarized with environmental protection technologies implemented at the site of production. The main feature of TANEKO treatment facilities is the principle implementation of zero wastewater discharge, the possibility of returning treated wastewater into production and recycling of all sludge and sediments generated in the process. A distinctive feature of the purification process is absence of both primary and secondary settlers. At the exit from aeration tanks activated silt is collected by membrane bioreactors. Dewatering of the sludge, sediments and redundant silt is implemented on compact centrifuges. All this has allowed reducing the area of treatment facilities down to 9.2 hectares, as well as to completely eliminating probability of discharging pathogenic substances in the environment.

After visiting the production site Rustam Minnikhanov held a meeting dedicated to the issues of the "NPiNHZ Complex in Nizhnekamsk" project implementation. The report on "Progress in industrial activity, construction completion and comprehensive testing of the starting complex 1A1 facilities" was made by Khamza Bagmanov, General Director of TANEKO. He, in particular, informed that 3,284 thousand tons of crude oil were processed during the comprehensive testing and equipment operation. To date, the performance of ELOU-AVT-7 (CDU/VDU) has on the average been increased to 93 percent, the conversion depth has increased to 71 percent and the yield of light oil products has increased up to 45 percent. Visbreaking furnaces have been converted from natural gas to fuel gas of own production, which has significantly reduced the consumption of natural gas. Also production of a new product has been started: purified LPG (NGL) fed to "Nizhnekamskneftekhim" as a raw material.

Nickolay Zaikin, Department Head of the combined hydrocracking installation construction project, presented a report on the next phase of the NPiNHZ Complex implementation. Full-scale combined hydrocracking installation construction works were started in 2011 concurrently with the works completion on the Phase 1A1 facilities of the NPiNHZ Complex.

The combined hydrocracking installation, which will be incorporated into the process of TANECO Complex NPiNHZ, has been designed to process up to 2.9 million tons of vacuum gas oil per year. As a result of processing the vacuum gas oil from the CDU/VDU-7 it will allow increasing the yield of light petroleum products and obtaining high-quality commercial products.
During the meeting Minnikhanov emphasized that all the participants of the "NPiNHZ Complex in Nizhnekamsk" project had executed a considerable amount of work. The experience gained should be taken into account to ensure the timely completion of construction and commissioning activities within the scheduled period. The President also said that the advanced technology used at TANECO should be replicated all around the Republic and outside.