North refinery in Beijy restores full production – Minister

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com – Iraq ’s Oil Minister, Abdul-Kerim Lueiby, has said on Saturday that his Ministry’s cadres have managed to repair the North Unit in north-central Iraq ’s Beijy Refinery, and to restore its productive capacity of 150,000 barrels of oil products per day (bpd) in a record time.   “The Oil Ministry’s cadres in Beiji Refinery and supporting companies have managed to repair Beijy Refinery, after a corruption attack on its ‘North’ Refinery Unit, restoring its 150,000 bpd productivity,” Minister Lueiby told IraqiNews.com news agency.   He said the Ministry, with record efforts have managed to restore full production activity to the Unit, for which an experimental commissioning process took place, to resume the pumping process of oil products through the pipelines of the Refinery.   “The time took to repair the damage caused to the Refinery had been a record on the international level, as the world’s largest oil companies couldn’t lay such a short timing ceiling to report such oil installations, due to the size of corruption caused to the Refinery,” the Minister added.   The Minister said that the Refinery, with its Salahaddin and North Units “is capable to restore production, despite fact that Salahaddin Unit is under normal maintenance, hopefully to restore the Refinery’s full production capacity of 220,000 bpd, after the end of the maintenance works.”   Noteworthy is that a group of gunmen had broken through the ‘North’ Refinery, the largest refinery in Beijy’s compound on 26/2/2011, planted 5 explosive charges in its production unit, that blew up to kill its guard and wounding a technician, along with causing a huge fire in the Refinery, completely paralyzing it.   The fire had also caused the death of an engineer and wounded another technician, along with causing the huge fire.   Noteworthy is that Beijy Refinery is the largest oil Refinery in Iraq, supplying more than 10 Iraqi provinces with oil products, as it comprises 5 refineries, out of which the Salahaddin Refinery had stopped production for maintenance reasons over the past six months, whilst the attack on the ‘North’ Refinery on Thursday had threatened to cause a huge crisis in shortage of oil products during the forthcoming few months.   FT / SKH 550