Venezuela's El Palito refinery restarts-opposition

www.forbes.com Reuters, 01.24.03, 4:16 PM ET

CARACAS, Venezuela, Jan 24 (Reuters) - Venezuela's 130,000 barrel-per-day El Palito oil refinery has been successfully restarted by workers breaking a seven-week-long strike, striking workers said on Friday.

After several failed attempts to restore it, one of El Palito's crude units is running at 100,000 bpd, but auxiliary units including key gasoline producers, are still shut.

"One of the crude units is running, but it will take them a lot longer to restore full operation, because the other units are more complex," an opposition spokesman said.

In a daily report on the oil industry, the opposition estimated that the government had restored 275,000 bpd of local oil refining capacity, versus a total 1.3 million bpd available.

Government attempts to restart El Palito hit a snag two weeks ago when a fault caused an explosion sending a plume of black smoke into the air.

The Amuay-Cardon refinery is running one 50,000 bpd crude unit, while the Puerto la Cruz refinery is running at 75,000 bpd, the opposition said.

The Venezuelan-operated refinery in Curacao said it started up last weekend at a rate of 32,000 bpd, but an attempted start of the catalytic cracker failed and will take weeks to repair.

Venezuelan gasoline production, which is key to government efforts to break the strike and ease fuel shortages, is still well below the country's 250,000 bpd demand level.