Iraq’s Oil Minister, Abdulkarim Luaybi, said on Saturday that his ministry’s cadres have managed to repair the North Unit in north-central Iraq’s Baiji Refinery, and to restore its productive capacity of 150,000 barrels of oil products per day (bpd) in a record time, according to the news agency Aswat al-Iraq.
“The Oil Ministry’s cadres in Baiji Refinery and supporting companies have managed to repair Baiji Refinery, after an attack on its North Refinery Unit, restoring its 150,000 bpd productivity,” Luyabi told the news agency.
He said the ministry has managed to restore full production activity to the Unit, for which an experimental commissioning process took place, to resume the pumping process of oil products through the pipelines of the refinery.
“The time [it] took to repair the damage caused to the refinery had been a record on the international level, as the world’s largest oil companies couldn’t lay such a short timing ceiling to report such oil installations, due to the size of corruption caused to the refinery,” the minister said.
Luyabi said that the refinery, with its Salahaddin and North Units “is capable to restore production, despite the fact that the Salahaddin Unit is under normal maintenance, hopefully to restore the refinery’s full production capacity of 220,000 bpd, after the end of the maintenance works.”
A group of gunmen had broken through the ‘North’ Refinery, the country’s largest on February 26, planting five explosive charges in its production unit, that blew up and killed its guard and wounded a technician. The explosion caused a huge fire in the refinery, completely paralysing it. The fire had also caused the death of an engineer and wounded another technician, along with causing the huge fire.
The Baiji Refinery supplies more than 10 Iraqi provinces with oil products. It comprises five refineries, one of which was the Salahaddin Refinery which stopped production for maintenance reasons for the past six months.
