Daily Times

KARACHI: The National Refinery Limited (NRL) on Thursday announced revamp plan of its lube refinery.

In a bourse filing , NRL disclosed that it entered into an Engineering, Procurement,

Construction and Commissioning (EPCC) agreement with China-based company HUALU for the revamp of the two-stage distillation unit at its Lube-1 Refinery. The contract is valued at $8.43 million, while the project cost is currently estimated to be Rs 1.33 billion.

NRL expects to fund the project through internal resources, and the timeline for the completion of the project is stated to be 18 months.

Following the completion of the revamp project, the company expects to increase Lube-1 refinery’s crude oil processing capacity by 5000 barrels per day which estimates to add 1.65 million barrels a year and Lube Base Oil (LBO) production by 6000 tons a year, adding 44,724 barrels per year.

Currently, the Lube-1 refinery is capable of processing 12.05000 barrels per day of crude oil or 3.98 million barrels a year-the revamp would increase Lube-1 refinery’s crude oil processing capacity by 41.5 percent, said Hassan Ali, an analyst at Shajar Research. The Lube-1 refinery currently has a designed capacity of 533.4000 barrels of LBO a year-the revamp would increase the refinery’s LBO capacity by 8.4 percent, he added.

Published in Daily Times, March 9^th 2018.