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Re ning technologies upgraded to enhance
quality and quantity
In response to Taiwan's increasingly demanding environmental
and quality of life standards, coupled with the need to produce
a wider range of petroleum products, CPC has in recent years
moved to both improve the quality of its products and enhance
their production value. Refining and production facilities
have had design and process upgrades to enable supplying
Taiwan's domestic market with higher-grade products, such
as desulfurized gasoline and diesel. At the same time, these
upgrades have raised the level of production efficiency across
the whole range of refining processes.
Additionally, CPC operates facilities enabling compliance
with the Environmental Protection Administration's 2011
directive stating the parameters for the sulfur and aromatics
content of gasoline and diesel fuel. These plants consist of a
30,000-barrel-per-day cracked gasoline hydrodesulfurization
plant at the Taoyuan Refinery, completed in 2008; a
20,000-barrel-per-day cracked gasoline hydrodesulfurization
plant at the Dalin Refinery, completed in 2009; and a similar
40,000-barrel-per-day plant for diesel at the Dalin Refinery,
completed in 2010. Additionally the 18,000-barrel-per-day
cracked gasoline quality improvement plant was moved from
the Kaohsiung Refinery to the Dalin Refinery in 2011.
Additional facilities at the Dalin Refinery include an
80,000-barrel-per-day residue fluid catalytic cracking (RFCC)
facility, which began mass production in 2013. At that same
location, construction of a 14,000-barrel-per-day alkylation
plant able to take advantage of the plentiful supply of crude
butane feedstock from the refinery's heavy fuel oil conversion
facility began in 2008; this plant, designed to boost gasoline
quality, began mass production in 2013. In order to eliminate
acidic process fumes and reduce emissions, CPC constructed
a new sulfur plant with a daily output of 250 tons that began
producing high-grade sulfur in mid-2014. To meet the increased
need for low-sulfur fuel oil feedstock following commissioning
of the heavy fuel oil conversion facility at Dalin, CPC is planning
to revamp the No.3 residue hydrodesulfurization (RDS) plant,
with investment slated for March 2017.
Due to the aforementioned closure of the Kaohsiung Refinery,
CPC is installing additional process plant at its Dalin site to
ensure an uninterrupted supply of raw materials to Taiwan's
petrochemical industry. Current plans call for the construction
of an ambient-pressure petroleum distillation facility with a
daily refining capacity of 150,000 barrels, a 50,000-barrel light
crude distillation facility, and hydrodesulfurization plants for
both diesel (40,000 barrels) and kerosene (30,000 barrels) - all
of which are expected to be completed by June 2017.
To boost the value of mixed C4 hydrocarbons produced by
the heavy fuel oil conversion plant used for manufacturing
high-value petrochemical products, CPC is involved in a
joint-venture to build and operate an 180,000-ton-per-year
isononanol (INA) plant and a 144,000-ton-per-year methyl
tert-butyl ether (MTBE) facility; the project is now in the
planning stage (until mid-2017) and production should start
in or by 2019.
While CPC is mainly focused on supplying its domestic market
for petroleum products, it does export any surplus: in 2015
approximately 2.798 million kiloliters of its major products went
to Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines,
the UAE, and China. The company plans to further develop
export markets in order to boost profitability.
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Downstream Operations