OREANDA-NEWS. November 19, 2012. Rustam Minnikhanov began his visit to "TANECO" with a tour of the combined hydrocracking installation site, which is one of the stages of the oil refinery development program and is designed to further increase the depth of oil refining, reported the press-centre of TATNEFT.

Construction and installation works are being carried out at 1B start-up complex at a rapid pace today. There are about 2,500 people involved on-site every day. The plans provide for erection of 785 units of the major process equipment.

The greater part of construction works has been completed to date (more than 431 thousand cubic meters of earthwork operations were carried out, about 11 thousand piles were installed, 61 thousand cubic meters of concrete were placed and more than 54 thousand tons of metal structures were erected).

Equipment mounting and piping, as well as mounting of process pipelines is underway. About 84 kilometers of the pipeline were installed in aggregate. A significant amount of work on the installation of heavy-tonnage equipment was performed in summer and early autumn of 2012, including a fractionator, high pressure separators, absorber and separator of recycle gas compressor, isodewaxing reactor, sulfur compounds hydrogenation reactor and others.

The design voltage was supplied to main substation No. 2 of the oil refinery complex in September providing power for the facilities of the "TANECO" second stage. The facility was built within a record timeframe of one year only. The voltage delivery means the beginning of the countdown to commissioning of the hydrocracking complex. The plans envisage feeding power to the distribution and transformer substation and further to the electric load using equipment of specific consumers of the combined hydrocracking installation in December. In addition, the combined hydrocracking complex will be connected by a racking scaffold to the operating "TANECO" complex by the end of November.

Rustam Minnikhanov also visited a number of key facilities of the already operating refinery. In particular, he inspected the granulated sulfur production facility commissioned in August, held a meeting on the completion of construction works of the "TANECO" first stage facilities and the progress of the combined hydrocracking installation with project managers, specialists and contractors involved in the project implementation.

Information Reference

TATNEFT started construction of the Refining and Petrochemical Plants Complex in Nizhnekamsk in 2008.

The first phase of "TANECO" was put into operation in December of 2011. The whole production chain of Phase 1A1 was process-wise completed in August of 2012 with the start of granulated sulfur production.

Currently "TANECO" processes 7 million tons of increased sulfur content (1.8%) crude oil a year with 73.1% conversion ratio, while the oil with sulfur content between 1.3 - 1.4 % is acceptable for export route supplies in accordance with approved standards.

Thus, already today, "TANECO" accepts more sulfurous oil than of export quality (today the refinery is ready to increase the amount of processing up to 9 million tons a year). In the future, TATNEFT intends to process up to 14 million tons of crude oil a year at the "TANECO" complex.

The combined hydrocracking installation being constructed will process up to 2.9 million tons of vacuum gas oil to increase the yield of middle distillates (kerosene and diesel fuel). The hydrocracking installation will allow increasing the output of light oil products and obtaining high quality marketable products, improving the raw materials processing efficiency and producing motor fuels of Euro-5 category.

The next stage of the "TANECO" project implementation will be the construction of an advanced oil processing complex with the depth refining ratio reaching 97%.

The project implementation with the investments amounting to more than 200 billion rubles as of today will create a new petrochemical industry cluster stimulating economic diversification, of the region through establishing the works for production of high added value goods.