Croatia's INA Industrija Nafte DD refinery
lets contract for upgrading project

July 07, 2015    + + +   Croatia’s INA Industrija Nafte DD (INA) has let a contract to Findland’s Neste Jacobs Oy to provide project management consultancy (PMC) for a residue upgrade program to be implemented at its 4.5 million-tonne/year (tpy) refinery along the northern part of the Adriatic Sea at Urinj, Rijeka province, Croatia.

In addition to performing project management services, Neste Jacobs will provide consultant services focused on areas of project control, information, quality, and procurement of services for both front-end engineering design and engineering, procurement, and construction, Neste Jacobs said.
As part of the contract, Neste Jacobs already has formed and mobilized a team of consultants to work with INA’s internal project team as part of an integrated project management team to support the residue upgrade program’s development and procurement process, according to the service provider.

A value of the PMC contract was not disclosed.

With an overall cost of more than $400 million, the Rijeka refinery’s residue upgrade program is designed to improve the refinery’s market competitiveness by increasing conversion of the site’s existing production to lighter, more valuable products such as LPG, gasoline, and diesel, INA said in its annual report for 2014.

Specifically, the upgrade will include the following installations: a delayed coker, a coke port, a handling system, and associated off sites.

This latest contract follows INA’s previous contract award to Bechtel Hydrocarbon Technology Solutions Inc. (BHTS), Houston, for basic design of a delayed coking unit using BHTS’s ThruPlus coking technology for the project, according to a Feb. 28, 2014, news release from INA.

The residue upgrade project at Rijeka comes in the wake of a series of modernization efforts INA has undertaken at its two Croatian refineries over the last few years, all of which aim to boost the refineries’ profitability and environmental competitiveness by increasing production of cleaner, higher-value products while simultaneously reducing harmful emissions, the company said.

By May 2011, INA had commissioned three new units within the Rijeka refinery’s hydrocracking complex, including a mild hydrocracking unit, hydrogen unit, and Claus sulfur recovery unit.

At its 2.2 million-tpy refinery in Sisak, Croatia, 30 miles south of Zagreb, INA has invested more than $170 million to construct new processing units, including a $5 million replacement of coke chambers in April, all designed to improve crude processing efficiency as well as enable production of petroleum products that meet Euro 5 quality standards (OGJ Online, Sept. 19, 2014).

Other additions at Sisak have included installation of a Claus sulfur recovery unit, an FCC gasoline hydrodesulfurization unit, an isomerization unit, and a new wastewater treatment plant.

Both the Rijeka and Sisak refineries currently are equipped to produce Euro 5 quality fuels, according to INA, which is jointly owned by majority stakeholders the Republic of Croatia and Hungary’s MOL PLC, a subsidiary of MOL Group, Budapest.

Source: Robert Brelsford, Downstream Technology Editor
Published by Oil & Gas Journal