All Kazakh refineries to produce jet fuel
By Kamila Aliyeva
All three oil refineries in Kazakhstan will produce jet fuel, Kazakh Energy Minister Kanat Bozumbayev said at a press conference on December 26, Kazinform reported.
“Our country produces, or at least, produced fuel before the modernization of the refineries only at the Shymkent oil refinery. A small volume is in Atyrau. This is due to the imperfection of the technology at our refineries and the fact that the Pavlodar refinery is reoriented to rather heavy Russian oil insofar as it has a high content of dissolved sulfur. These plants did not have facilities for cleaning fuel from sulfur. Now, in Pavlodar this installation is built, and in Atyrau too. These two plants will produce aviation kerosene. Only its standard will change a little - it will become Western,” he said.
Due to the occurred fuel shortage, the management of Air Astana airline asked the government for help, according to the minister.
“This plant (Shymkent refinery) has always provided the market demand by about 50 percent, and another 50 percent was bought from outside, mostly from the Russian Federation. It so happened that in the summer of last year jet fuel was in need in Russia itself. Therefore, Russian refineries started to refuse selling aviation kerosene, and the head of Air Astana, Peter Foster, asked the government of Kazakhstan to intervene,” he noted.
Bozumbayev said that as a result, the agreement on the assistance on acquisition of jet fuel in case of need has been reached.
“Therefore, until January 2018 inclusive, Air Astana will have fuel. The Scat airline, probably, thought that we should help them in this matter too. This is not true. There is a supervising agency in the person of the Ministry for Investment and Development, which distributes schedules for the delivery of aviation kerosene, which is produced at the Shymkent oil refinery. We produce aviation kerosene and say - distribute it among the airlines yourselves, since this is a deficit. This is not our issue,” he added.
Kazakhstan has three major oil refineries - Atyrau, Shymkent and Pavlodar. All of them are being currently modernized.
The refining capacity of all the three plants will increase from 13.8 to 16.5 million tons after modernization of the refinery completes. Production of all types of light oil products, gasoline, diesel fuel and aviation kerosene will increase. All plants will produce gasoline for 2.3 million tons more. The production of diesel fuel will increase for 917,000 tons and aviation kerosene for 539,000 tons.
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Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva
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