Fire and Explosion at Shell Refinery in Germany cuts production by 50 Percent

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Shell's Godorf Refinery in Germany Damaged by Fire (Update2)

Shell's Godorf Refinery in Germany Damaged by Fire (Update2)

(Adds comment from Germany from fifth paragraph.)

London, March 24 (Bloomberg) -- Royal Dutch/Shell Group said its Godorf refinery in Germany is operating at 50 percent of its normal capacity following a fire last night.

The fire, in one of the Cologne refinery's two distillation units, started at 6:20 p.m. local time, a spokeswoman said. There were no injuries.

The Godorf refinery is Germany's fourth-largest, producing 10 million tons of oil products a year. About 20 percent of its output is used to make petrochemicals.

``An investigation team is in there'' trying to find the cause of the blaze, said Cerris Tavinor, a Shell spokeswoman.

``There are no problems with making deliveries at the moment.''

Damage to the plant will run into millions of deutsche marks, a spokesman in Germany said. An initial fire was followed some 15 minutes later by an explosion, Lars-Olaf Brendel said. Local fire crews managed to bring the fire under control by 8 p.m.

He said there is no problem supplying customers from stocks although Shell cannot say for long deliveries will remain unaffected until it has completed its damage assessment.

The refinery has the capacity to refine 170,000 barrels of crude oil a day. Shell didn't say when it expects to restart production from the affected unit.

http://quote.bloomberg.com/news2.cgi?T=energy_refout.ht&s=81584357

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), March 24, 2000


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