According to the company, the fire started in a condensate pot of the coking unit, or coker. The coker converts low value residual products (like asphalt) to lighter products of a higher value (such as gasoline or diesel) by exposing them to high heat and pressure.
Under normal conditions, the Cheyenne refinery runs 52,000 barrels per day. Before the fire, the refinery’s crude unit was running 43,000 barrels per day. Immediately after the fire the crude unit was not running at all. By noon today, production was expected to be at 25,000 barrels per day and will remain at that level until repairs to the coker are complete. Although the damage assessment is not yet final, Doug Aron, Frontier Oil’s vice president of corporate finance said that preliminary estimates indicate repairs to the coker will take less than 30 days.
While the coker is undergoing repair, Aron said that employment at the refinery will actually increase as more contractors will be brought in to help get the unit back to full capacity.
When available, Frontier Oil will post throughput estimates and outage assessment under the investor relations section of its Web site: http://www.frontieroil.com/.
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