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Iran's Shazand refinery’s gasoline production unit remains offline

Business Materials 22 December 2014 13:15 (UTC +04:00)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 22

By Umid Niayesh - Trend:

The second unit of Iran's Imam Khomeini Refinery of Shazand city (located in the central province of Markazi) has failed to resume its activity after 30 days of being offline, Mohammad Hassan Asafari, member of the National Security and Foreign Policy Commission of the parliament said.

Asafari said that the officials were not be able to fix the problems so far, accusing the oil ministry of being responsible for the problem due to dismissal of certain experts from work, the country's Fars news agency reported Dec. 22.

The refinery's Residual Fluid Catalytic Cracking (RFCC) unit went offline again for second time in late November due to some technical problem in valves.

As a result the refinery's Euro 4 gasoline production has almost been halved again.

The operation of the RFCC unit was suspended for 10 days in early-November for periodic repairs. On Nov. 15 while the periodic repair was coming to end a fire took place in the unit due to oil products' leakage in discharge point of the refinery's main tower.

Asafari said that the shut down has so far imposed over $300 million in losses to the country's economy.

Oil ministry is responsible on the issue and the minister is invited to the parliament to clarify the issue, the MP said.

The main part of the refinery's produced gasoline is transferred to capital city of Tehran.

During the downtime, the refinery's Euro-4 gasoline production was decreased by 8-9 million liters from 16 million per day and Tehran's gasoline demand partly supplied from storage tanks, as well as imported gasoline.

Shazand refinery produced over 3.039 billion liters of gasoline conforming to Euro-4 standard in the first seven months of the current Iranian fiscal year (March 21 - Oct. 22).

The refinery also produced 2.78 billion liters of diesel oil conforming to Euro-4 standard in the mentioned period. Some 120 million liters of super gasoline were also produced in the seven-month time span.

Iran needs to import around 10 million liters of gasoline daily to meet its domestic demands.

The country imports only the gasoline conforming to Euro-4 standard, as import of Euro-2 gasoline has been banned.

Umid Niayesh is Trend Agency's staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @UmidNiayesh

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