A fire broke out at the Atyrau Oil Refinery in Kazakhstan — one of the country’s three largest oil refineries, with a capacity of 5.5 million tonnes per year, as confirmed by the enterprise’s press service, UNN reports.
Details
The enterprise’s press service reported that at the Atyrau Oil Refinery, "at 12:35 p.m. on August 25, a fire broke out at the settling tank of the closed-type mechanical wastewater treatment facilities. No work was being carried out at the site at the time of the incident. The oil sludge inside the settling tank is burning."
"There were no casualties. The plant continues to operate normally," the statement said.
The country’s Ministry of Emergency Situations reported that the fire had been completely extinguished.
The plant, Moscow Times notes, is located in the Atyrau Region, which borders Russia’s Astrakhan Region. It was commissioned in 1945, and its owner is the national oil and gas company "KazMunayGas."
The incident, it is noted, occurred after reports in the Russian media that Kazakhstan had agreed to refine Russian oil and return 70% of the produced gasoline and diesel fuel to Moscow. The country’s Energy Minister Erlan Akkenzhenov уточнил, that the Kondensat plant, with a capacity of 850,000 tonnes per year, would be used to implement this agreement.
Kazakhstan has also begun supplying Russia, where a second wave of the fuel crisis is gaining momentum, with small batches of AI-92 gasoline.