PetroChina Shuts Dushanzi Oil Refinery for 40-Day Maintenance

PetroChina Co., the nation's largest oil company, shut a refinery in northwestern China for 40 days for scheduled maintenance, a company official said.

The Dushanzi plant in Xinjiang, China's biggest province, was shut on Aug. 1, the official from the refinery, who didn't want to be named because of company policy, said by telephone today. The refinery will use fuel stockpiles to supply the local market during the maintenance, the official said.

Dushanzi has annual capacity to process 6 million metric tons (about 120,000 barrels a day) of crude oil and produce 220,000 tons of ethylene, the official said.

PetroChina is expanding the Dushanzi refinery to process more Kazakhstan crude transmitted through a pipeline from the Central Asian nation, Ismail Tilwaldo, the governor of Xinjiang, said March 9.

The refinery will be able to process 10 million tons of oil and produce 1 million tons of ethylene on an annual basis by 2008, he said. Ethylene is the basic building block of plastics and synthetic fibers.