Page 18 - CPC 2018 Annual Report

16 CPC Corporation, Taiwan 2018
The Dalin Refinery was originally established as a part of the Kaohsiung complex but in 1996 was hived off as an independent operation. Its daily capacity is 300,000 barrels, with both incoming crude and outgoing refined products handled by four offshore mooring and unloading buoys and dedicated port facilities.
The Taoyuan Refinery started up in 1976. Following renovations and the addition of a second distillation plant, it now has a daily refining capacity of 200,000 barrels.
In 2017 CPC’s total output of refined petroleum products amounted to (in million kiloliters): gasoline 9.753; aviation fuel 1.918; diesel 5.761; fuel oil 3.041. Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) production totaled 377,000 metric tons.
REFINING TECHNOLOGY UPGRADED TO ENHANCE QUALITY AND QUANTITY
In response to Taiwan’s ever more demanding environmental and quality of life standards, coupled with the government’s increasingly strict enforcement of the environmental protection regulations enacted to improve air quality and reduce haze, CPC has in recent years moved to both improve the quality of its products and raise their production value. Refining and production facilities have undergone design and process upgrades to enable the supply of higher- grade products – such as desulfurized gasoline and diesel – to Taiwan’s internal market. At the same time, those upgrades have raised the level of production efficiency across the whole range of refining processes.
Additionally, CPC’s refinery facilities are in compliance with the Environmental Protection Administration’s (EPA) 2011 directive setting parameters for the sulfur and aromatics content of gasoline and diesel fuel. The EPA measure required that diesel fuel’s sulfur content be reduced to 10ppmw or less, its aromatic hydrocarbon content to 35vol% or less and that the olefin content in gasoline be 18vol% or less. The aforementioned facilities consist of a 30,000-barrel-per-day cracked gasoline hydro-desulfurization plant at the Taoyuan Refinery, completed in 2008; a 20,000-barrel-per-day cracked gasoline hydro- desulfurization 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. The 18,000-barrel-per-day cracked gasoline quality improvement plant at the Kaohsiung Refinery was moved to the Dalin site in 2011.
In 2006 CPC began construction of an 80,000-barrel-per- day residual fluid catalytic cracking (RFCC) facility at the Dalin refinery to upgrade its refining infrastructure and heavy oil recovery rate. That plant began mass production in 2013. At the same location, construction of a 14,000-barrel-per-day alkylation plant – designed to boost gasoline quality and to take advantage of the plentiful supply of crude butane feedstock
from the refinery’s heavy fuel oil conversion facility – began in 2008 and was completed in 2013 with the onset of mass production. With the aim of eliminating acidic fumes from the alkylation process and reducing other harmful emissions, CPC has built an extraction plant that began producing a daily output of 250 tons of high-grade sulfur in mid-2014.
In March 2017 CPC initiated its fully-funded plan for revamping the No. 3 residue hydro-desulfurization (RDS) plant at the Dalin Refinery. The scheme is aimed at boosting capacity for refining high-sulfur crude oil, thereby reducing procurement costs and reinforcing both the quality and stability of supply of the feedstock for its residual oil conversion facility. The plan’s overall scope includes updating and restarting the existing residual oil hydrogenation and desulfurizing site within the Taoyuan refinery, plus construction of a 70,000-barrel-per-day desulfurization plant. But the immediate goal was to get both buy-in from local residents and approval by the competent authorities.
Due to the aforementioned closure of the Kaohsiung Refinery in late 2015, CPC is in the throes of installing an additional processing plant at its Dalin site to ensure an uninterrupted supply of raw materials to Taiwan’s petrochemical industry. The plans call for the construction of a crude distillation unit (CDU) with a daily refining capacity of 150,000 barrels; a 50,000-barrel condensate fractionation unit (CFU) and hydro-desulfurization plants for both diesel (40,000 barrels) and kerosene (30,000 barrels) – all of which were due for completion in November 2017. After that, the Dalin complex’s No. 9 CDU plant – which has been in operation for 40 years and has a daily refining capacity of 100,000 barrels – would be shut down. CPC’s overall daily crude oil refining capacity will eventually be raised to 600,000 barrels when the Dalin site’s throughput reaches 400,000 barrels a day.
CPC is involved in a joint venture with a Japanese firm to build and operate an 180,000-ton-per-year isononanol (INA) plant as well as a 144,000-ton-per-year methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) facility. Construction is scheduled to begin in July 2018 and production to start up at the end of 2021. The project’s rationale is to boost the utility and commercial worth of the mixed C4 hydrocarbons produced by the heavy fuel oil conversion plant that turns out high-value petrochemical materials.
External sales of key refined products in 2017 amounted to approximately 3.012 million kiloliters. They were sold mainly to South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, the Sultanate of Oman, Angola, Papua New Guinea and Hong Kong and other destinations. CPC will continue developing these and other export markets in the future as a means of helping to optimize the company's overall manufacturing efficiency and return on investment.