ASTANA, Kazakhstan, March 26. The Shymkent Oil Refinery, one of Kazakhstan's three largest, has temporarily ceased operations, Trend reports.
According to KazMunayGas JSC (Kazakhstan's national oil and gas company), the plant's operations were suspended due to the start of repair work.
"Planned maintenance work is carried out in compliance with the law on civil protection in the field of industrial safety to ensure the further safe operation of the enterprise’s technological installations and in accordance with the schedule of the Ministry of Energy," KMG said.
It was noted that prior to the plant's suspension, the country had sufficient stocks of all types of petroleum products. They will be distributed evenly over the domestic market.
At the same time, KMG pointed out that the Pavlodar Petrochemical and Atyrau Oil Refineries continue to produce fuel as usual. Planned maintenance work on them will be carried out in the summer and autumn of this year.
Meanwhile, a roadmap has been signed in Kazakhstan to resolve priority issues for the project to expand the production capacity of the Shymkent Oil Refinery.
Thus, according to the Roadmap, the Shymkent oil refinery's production capacity will be doubled to 12 million tons.
The Shymkent Oil Refinery, which was opened in 1985 in the city of Shymkent, is Kazakhstan's newest. The plant accounts for 30 percent of the entire current volume of petroleum products generated by Kazakhstan's three refineries.
Shymkent Oil Refinery finished a large-scale renovation and redevelopment project in 2018.
As a result, the quality of the produced fuel was raised to K-5 standards, the level of environmental safety was raised, and the plant's design capacity was expanded to 6 million tons per year.
