Indian Oil Corp hopes to restart a 150,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) crude distillation unit (CDU) at its Panipat refinery in the next 2-3 days, its head of refineries said on Monday, days after the unit caught fire due to a naphtha leak.
IOC, the country’s top refiner, had shut the CDU and some other secondary units at the 300,000-bpd refinery in the northern state of Haryana for about a month from mid-February for routine maintenance.
“After the maintenance and inspection, the unit (crude distillation unit) was under start-up. There was a naphtha leak from a cooler upstream,” BV Rama Gopal, IOC’S head of refineries, told Reuters.
The state-controlled company has two equal size CDUs at the refinery.
IOC said one worker died due to the fire on Saturday.
