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Sonatrach says Skikda LNG plant has resumed production
ALGERIA
SONATRACH, the national oil company (NOC) of Algeria, confirmed last week that it had restarted production at the Skikda LNG plant.
In a statement, Sonatrach said that the gas liq- uefaction plant had resumed normal operations on July 30 after a shutdown that lasted 45 days. It said it had used the time the facility was off line to wrap up the repair of a gas turbine and complete maintenance work originally scheduled for 2022.
The shutdown did not have any adverse effects on Skikda LNG’s customers, it added. While the plant was idle, it explained, Sonatrach’s Arzew LNG facility sent some of the volumes produced by its own three trains to buyers waiting for fuel from Skikda LNG.
The Algerian NOC had said in a statement in June that the shutdown was necessary because of technical problems. “A technical issue occurred on June 11 at the Skikda LNG complex and led to the shutdown of this complex,” it said. It described the problem as “a sudden failure of a gas turbine control mechanism” but did not
elaborate.
The Skikda plant, located on Algeria’s north-
ern coast, processes gas from the Hassi R’Mel fields and is capable of turning out 4mn tonnes per year (tpy) of LNG. It remained off line for more than half of 2020, powering down in Jan- uary for a scheduled two-month maintenance programme and then extending the closure until July following the discovery of damage to one of the plant’s 14 turbines in February.
Sonatrach opted last year to repair the tur- bine rather than replace it, as the replacement process would have kept the Skikda facility out of production for 18 months. It also sought to compensate for the loss of the plant’s capac- ity by increasing the volume of LNG exported from the Arzew plant. Even so, the extension of the maintenance programme caused Algeria’s LNG exports to drop to 10.9mn tonnes in 2020, equivalent to just 43% of the 25.3 tpy opera- tional export capacity of the Skikda and Arzew plants.
Week 31 05•August•2021 w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m P7
