Early on August 29, a process fire occurred in the interconnecting piping between the hydrotreating units and environmental units at Syncrude’s Mildred Lake upgrader. Emergency personnel quickly responded to the incident and safely extinguished the fire. No injuries were associated with the event and there was no environmental impact.
Syncrude is currently developing a full recovery plan, beginning with an investigation to determine the cause of the incident. The main coker conversion units were not damaged and Syncrude continues to operate, however, synthetic crude oil production has been temporarily suspended while a recovery and repair strategy are being developed....
The fire broke out a few hours after the province’s energy regulator announced it was shutting in 95 pipelines operated by Nexen, one of the partners in the project, because of safety issues identified following a large oil-related spill in July.
Syncrude is a 326,000 barrel-per-day mining and upgrading project, where mined oil sands bitumen is upgraded into refinery-ready synthetic crude.