Iraq’s new 140,000 b/d Karbala refinery is facing technical troubles once again with state marketer Somo reporting on 4 April that “heat exchanger leaks” led to an outage from 20 February to 3 March without specifying whether the 12-day shutdown was refinery-wide or unit specific.
Since the start-up of initial units last April, the plant has had to be taken offline multiple times (MEES, 9 June 2023), with the outages continuing after the plant’s full commissioning in September (MEES, 20 October 2023). Commissioning continued despite underlying equipment problems not having been fully resolved. (CONTINUED - 181 WORDS)