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NorthAmOil PROJECTS & COMPANIES NorthAmOil
ExxonMobil reportedly planning Baton
Rouge refinery maintenance
US EXXONMOBIL is reportedly planning to shut in Indiana were taken offline following a fire on
down units at its Baton Rouge, Louisiana refinery August 24. As of August 25, the timing of the
for maintenance in January 2023. Citing sources restart of these units was unknown and there
familiar with the matter, Reuters reported this were concerns over the impact the outage would
week that the super-major was planning to carry have on regional fuel prices if it were prolonged.
out maintenance work at a coker and crude dis- According to Wood Mackenzie’s Genscape,
tillation units (CDUs) at the refinery, which has BP shut two crude units at the 435,000 bpd refin-
a capacity of 520,000 barrels per day. ery after the fire. A source familiar with the mat-
The sources said that the 50,000 bpd Far East ter was also cited by Bloomberg as saying the fire
coker would be shut in early January in order to had occurred in the power house, causing a loss
replace all four of its coke drums. This is expected of cooling water, which could lead to damaged
to take 68 days to complete. Maintenance work equipment.
on the CDUs will be carried out while the coker The news service added that the units that
is shut, according to the sources, beginning with had been shut included the 255,000 bpd Pipes-
the largest of the four units and followed by the till 12, the region’s largest crude unit, and the
smaller ones. 70,000 bpd Pipestill 11A. However, the 102,000
ExxonMobil declined to comment on the bpd coker that supports Pipestill 12 was reported
report of the upcoming work. to still be running, which may allow for a more
Meanwhile, units at BP’s Whiting refinery rapid restart in the coming days.
ENERGY TRANSITION
Enverus flags up Southern
Louisiana’s CCUS potential
LOUISIANA THE carbon capture, utilisation and storage potential, a firm understanding of the reservoir
potential of Southern Louisiana has been high- being injected into is essential. We aim to not
lighted in a new report by Enverus Intelligence only daylight and compare the projects that have
Research (EIR), a subsidiary of energy data ana- been announced thus far but provide a look at
lytics firm Enverus. opportunities that may lie in the near term, for
The company said this week that it had future projects of their kind.”
evaluated 10mn tonnes per year (tpy) of oper- EIR’s report identified eight project locations
ational global sequestration capacity, consid- for carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration in Lou-
ering reservoir quality and proximity to point isiana that have been announced, amounting to
source emissions and transportation as leading 2bn tonnes of combined disclosed storage. First
indicators. Based on the findings of the eval- injection dates for these volumes are scheduled
uation, EIR said the Southern Louisiana Oli- between 2022 and 2026.
gocene-Miocene stands out among numerous The company noted that the capacity avail-
locations and is among the best storage reser- able currently only represents 3% of planned
voirs in the world. global sequestration capacity. CCUS is gaining
“With the recent, substantial uptick in CCUS momentum and increasingly seen as an impor-
project announcements across the Lower 48, tant component of the energy transition. In
Southern Louisiana stands out as a major hot- the US, development of CCUS capacity is now
bed for current and future sequestration activ- expected to pick up pace thanks to the recent
ity,” an Enverus senior geology associate, Evan signing into law of the Inflation Reduction Act,
MacDonald, stated. “To develop an idea of how which expands the scope of an existing tax credit
these projects stack up in terms of storage poten- for carbon capture, among other measures. (See
tial, and to derive insights into future project NorthAmOil Week 33)
P10 www. NEWSBASE .com Week 34 25•August•2022
