Site Visit – The KNPC Mina Al-Ahmadi Refinery
Kuwait Petroleum Company – Mina Al-Ahmadi Refinery
Wednesday 15 February 2012
| Over the past three decades, Kuwait National Petroleum Company has evolved as an important oil refining and gas processing complex in the Middle East, through constant modernization and expansion of its three refineries, namely Shuaiba (SHU), Mina Al-Abdulla (MAB) and Mina Al-Ahmadi (MAA). The total refining capacity is now a little over 900,000 bbl/day of crude oil. |
| In fact, Mina Al-Ahmadi refinery is the oldest among the refineries in the State of Kuwait and the refinery was founded in 1949, with a crude processing capacity of 25,000 barrels per day to meet local needs of petroleum products and bunkering fuel oil. Today Mina Al-Ahmadi refinery alone shares about 50% of the refining capacity at 466 bbl/day, and in addition with its three LPG Plants has been exporting the liquefied petroleum gas and Kuwait Natural Gasoline products, for more than three decades from 1978. The Gas Plant complex also houses a modern Acid Gas Removal Plant (AGRP) for treatment of sour gas with associated condensate received from the KOC sour fields. |
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The major milestones in Mina Al-Ahmadi refinery are the implementation of refinery modernization project (RMP) in 1984 and further up grading project (FUP) in 1985/86 with the introduction of conversion units like HCR and FCC. Further upgrading was carried out in 1997 by commissioning of MAFP project and production of unleaded gasoline by introduction of MTBE and alkylation units.
At the turn of the century, AGRP and ultra-low gas oil units were conceived and implemented
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| Furthermore, KNPC is drawing plans to increase its refining capacity to over 1 million bbl/day within the next 3 to 4 years and as well accommodate part of the heavier crude oils produced from Kuwait oil fields. Expansion and modernization of KNPC production facilities in the near future will result in compliance of the recent trends in world environmental regulations and the evolving stringent petroleum product specifications, both locally and internationally and thus competitively capturing the market demand for petroleum products. |
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The challenges envisaged are thus many and will involve expanding, reconfiguring and optimizing the existing refineries, in order to achieve higher margins on a sustainable basis. This will be realized through the proposed New Refinery Project (NRP) and Clean Fuels Project (CFP 2020) that involves up gradation of both MAA and MAB refineries and retiring SHU refinery.
Also as the growth of crude oil production worldwide is steadily increasing and this increase in crude production will be accompanied by exploiting/exploring new gas wells.
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Thus gas availability will also increase. Therefore new gas trains i.e. LPG Train IV and V are envisaged and the related project activities are in progress.
In the last decade we have seen the growth of petrochemical industries in Kuwait and so the integration between refineries and the petrochemical sectors are inevitable. Among the KNPC refineries MAA refinery is at the forefront of supplying the necessary petrochemical feedstocks like Ethane, propylene, etc.
Following