KUALA LUMPUR (March 16): Petronas Dagangan Bhd and Petronas Chemicals Group Bhd say the fire incident that occurred within the Pengerang Refinery Complex last night has had no impact on their businesses.
"We refer to the fire incident that occurred within the Pengerang Refinery Complex on 15 March 2020 at 10:39 pm. The said incident has no financial or operational impact to our current business," said PetDag in a brief stock exchange filing tonight.
Similarly, PetChem said: "We wish to inform that at this juncture PetChem’s current operations and business are not impacted by this incident."
The fire and explosion occurred at one of the facilities owned by Pengerang Refining and Petrochemical (PRefChem). In a statement earlier today, PRefChem said the incident occurred at the Diesel Hydro Treating Unit (DHT) within the Pengerang Refinery Complex at 10.39pm last night, and that five people were killed while one managed to escape unhurt.
This is the second fire at the Pengerang Integrated Complex (PIC) in less than a year.
In April 2019, an explosion and fire occurred at the plant’s atmospheric residue desulphurisation unit (ARDS), a unit that removes sulfur from fuel oil, which is then used to produce gasoline, resulting in the facility being unable to process high sulphur crude oil, up until sometime this year.
The ARDS has been scheduled for operation by mid-2020, and full commercial operations for PRefChem was targeted for the second half of 2020.
PRefChem’s joint ventures, namely Pengerang Petrochemical Co and Pengerang Refining Co, together operate a 300,000 bpd refinery, an integrated steam cracker with a capacity of 1.3 million mt of ethylene, with associated propylene, butadiene, benzene, polyolefins and ethylene glycol facilities.
The PIC also includes a petrochemical complex with an annual production capacity of 3.3 million tonnes.
PRefChem is a 50:50 strategic alliance between Petronas and Saudi Aramco.
PetDag shares closed 18 sen or 0.95% lower at RM18.82 today, giving it a market capitalisation of RM18.7 billion. PetChem, meanwhile, slipped 8 sen or 1.83% to close at RM4.30, which gave it a market value of RM34.4 billion.