Suncor’s Syncrude Mildred Lake oil sands facility has advanced a planned eight-week turnaround to mitigate the impact of a unplanned outage from a March 14 incident, where a loss of containment on a line near one of the naphtha hydrotreating units damaged a pipe rack, containing piping, cables and electrical circuits. The planned turnaround was originally scheduled to begin in April. Beginning this week, Suncor expects to handle volumes of untreated Syncrude production to assist in managing inventory.
Pipeline shipments of treated product are expected to resume at up to 50% capacity in April, gradually ramping up to full rates after the turnaround is completed. For the first two months of the year, Syncrude operated reliably at utilization rates of approximately 95%. Suncor has also seen strong production from its other oil sands assets and offshore operations. As a result, the company does not expect this outage to result in a change to Suncor’s overall production guidance for 2017.
The company also extended its best wishes for a speedy recovery to a Syncrude employee who was injured in the incident.
