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Chinese Refinery Blaze Extinguished

Chinese Refinery Blaze Extinguished
Chinese Refinery Blaze Extinguished

A fire that broke out on Thursday at state oil major PetroChina's plant in northeastern China, one of the country's largest refineries, has been put out with no reported casualties, state media reported.

The fire came just two months after the Dalian refinery finished a planned major maintenance. More than 600 firefighters extinguished the blaze at the plant's 1.4 million-tons-per-annum catalytic cracker just after 9:00 p.m. local time, and stayed on the scene to make sure equipment at the refinery remained cool, state broadcaster CCTV said on Friday, Reuters reported.

The inferno, the latest industrial incident to rock the port city of Dalian, started at around 6:40 p.m. due to a broken seal in a feed pump, CCTV said.

The refinery in Liaoning Province and owned by PetroChina Dalian Petrochemical Corp, has three crude distillation units with a total processing capacity of 410,000 barrels per day of crude oil. Catalytic crackers typically produce gasoline.

A spokesperson for PetroChina said the feedstock equipment connected to the catalytic cracker has been suspended. Other units in the refinery were not affected.

The unit that caught fire produces oil products but is geared toward gasoline, according to a Singapore-based trader. Firefighters battled huge flames and billowing smoke, pictures on the Twitter account of People's Daily showed.

Local government officials were at the site on Thursday evening as an investigation began into the cause of the inferno, state radio reported on its social media blog.

Environmental inspectors are carrying out checks but said containment pools installed at the refinery had prevented pollutants from entering coastal waters.

In 2013, an explosion at the refinery left two people injured and two missing. Dalian was also the site of one of China's biggest known oil spills, when a pipeline blast put at least hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the sea in July 2010.

 

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