April 13, 2012:

BEIJING –  China Petroleum and Chemical Corp. (SNP), or Sinopec, will keep eight of its refining units online for a year longer than previously planned before taking them offline for maintenance, the company said Friday. Atmospheric and vacuum distillation units at an additional eight refineries will be taken offline every four years for maintenance instead of every three years currently, the company said in an in-house newsletter. The move is part of efforts to increase overall capacity, it said.

The refineries are in Qingdao, Luoyang, Anqing, Tianjin, Wuhan, Zhenhai, Jinling and Guangzhou. At the end of 2011, Sinopec's maintenance plan included 183 refining units on a three-year maintenance cycle and 56 units on a four-year cycle. Between 2005 and 2011, Sinopec shifted its maintenance cycle for all refinery units to three years from two years, adding an extra 39 million tons of capacity for the period, it said. The resulting additional capacity enabled Sinopec to process an additional 219 million metric tons of crude from 2005 through the end of 2011.

Sinopec said the global standard for maintenance of atmospheric and vacuum distillation units is 6-8 years.

 By Dow Jones Newswires