Kuwait National Petroleum Co. (KNPC) is investigating the cause of a fire that broke out on Aug. 17 at its 466,000-b/d Mina Al Ahmadi refinery, which lies about 28 miles south of Kuwait City on the Persian Gulf.
The fire, which occurred in a wastewater treatment area, was brought under control by the refinery’s fire brigade, KNPC said in a series of recent posts to its Twitter account.
A number of contract employees working in the vicinity of the fire have been rushed to the nearest hospital with burns, but operations at the refinery as well as its associated gas plant and export terminal have not been impacted by the incident, the state-owned company said.
An investigation into the cause of the fire is now under way, KNPC said.
KNPC recently finalized a series of contracts for work related to its Clean Fuels Project (CFP) at the Mina Abdullah and Mina Al Ahmadi refineries (OGJ Online, Apr. 17, 2014), a multibillion dollar project designed to reconfigure the country’s three refineries and, in conjunction with grassroots construction planned at Al Zour, nearly double Kuwait’s total refining capacity to 1.4 million b/d.
Under the CFP, KNPC will integrate and upgrade the 270,000-b/d Mina Abdullah and Mina Al Ahmadi refineries and ultimately close the 200,000-b/d refinery at Shuaiba following the completion of the Al Zour refinery (OGJ Online, Dec. 6, 2013). The newly integrated refineries will operate as a merchant complex with total capacity of about 800,000 b/d, the company has said.
