January 25, 2019
While China’s main oil company has refused to take over Phase 11 of the South Pars gasfield from Total of France, China’s Sinopec Engineering Co. is staying in Iran to replace an old section of the Abadan refinery, modernizing a crude distillation plant built 70 years ago by the British.
The new unit will have a capacity of 210,000 barrels per day. That is 40,000 less than the section it is replacing, but the new unit will allow the quality of gasoline and diesel turned out to be raised to the Euro-5 standards. The Euro-5 standards took effect in the EU in September 2009. They were replaced by Euro-6 standards in September 2014.
The refinery’s manager, Ali-Akbar Mir-Qaderi, said the Abadan modernization project is due to be completed in another three years.
Sinopec signed a $1 billion contract to update the Abadan Oil Refinery in 2017. The refinery was built in 1912 and at one time was the largest refinery in the world, producing 635,000 barrels a day of refined products. Since being repaired after the Iran-Iraq war, the refinery has had a capacity of about 429,000 barrels a day.
