PHOTO
Image used for illustrative purposes. An oil refinery of Essar Oil, which runs India's second biggest private sector refinery, is pictured in Vadinar in the western state of Gujarat, India, October 4, 2016.
Indian Oil Corp hopes to restart a 150,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) crude distillation unit (CDU) at its Panipat refinery in the next 2-3 days, its head of refineries said on Monday, days after the unit caught fire due to a naphtha leak.
IOC, the country's top refiner, had shut the CDU and some other secondary units at the 300,000-bpd refinery in the northern state of Haryana for about a month from mid-February for routine maintenance.
"After the maintenance and inspection, the unit (crude distillation unit) was under start-up. There was a naphtha leak from a cooler upstream," B.V. Rama Gopal, IOC'S head of refineries, told Reuters.
The state-controlled company has two equal size CDUs at the refinery.
IOC said one worker died due to the fire on Saturday.
(Reporting by K. Sathya Narayanan in Bangalore and Nidhi Verma in New Delhi; Editing by Subhranshu Sahu) ((Sathya.Narayanan@thomsonreuters.com; within U.S. +1 651 848 5832, outside U.S. +91 80 6749 3226/1298; Reuters Messaging: sathya.narayanan.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net))
