The Management Board of Grupa LOTOS announces that the risk of failure to meet the deadline for obtaining full operational readiness of the Delayed Coking Unit has materialised.
EFRA
The Management Board of Grupa LOTOS announces that the risk of failure to meet the deadline for obtaining full operational readiness of the Delayed Coking Unit has materialised. As a result, the expected economic effects of the EFRA Project units will not be reflected in full in the Group’s consolidated financial results for 2018. To note, the current financial condition of Grupa LOTOS will in no way be affected by the delay.
The key units of the EFRA Project are being built under turnkey contracts by Kinetics Technology SpA of Italy (KT).
In the Management’s Discussion and Analysis for Q3 2017, published in October 2017, the Management Board of Grupa LOTOS stated that KT, the main contractor of the project, reported the risk of failure to meet the agreed date of reaching the Ready for Start Up status by the DCU, the main EFRA Project unit. Soon afterwards, the Management Board of Grupa LOTOS took certain corporate decisions (to the extent they could be put into life by the LOTOS Group) to support the main contractor. Both parties maintain ongoing contact to decide what actions need to be taken.
As at the end of December, the EFRA Project was 90% complete. So far, the following units have been upgraded or built and then delivered for tests:
- Power supply building for new units (GPZ4)
- Cooling towers of the cooling water system
- Diesel oil desulfurisation unit
- Oxygen generation unit (OGU)
- Amine regeneration and sour water stripper unit
- Sulfur recovery units
- Compressed air system
- Inter-unit connections (pipelines) – group 1
The EFRA (Effective Refining) Project comprises construction of a number of new refinery units and expansion or upgrade of existing ones, and is designed to significantly increase distillate yields at the Gdańsk refinery. The yields of high-margin products (mainly diesel oil and aviation fuel) from the same amount of crude are anticipated to grow by 900,000 tonnes. The refinery’s nominal throughput capacity is approximately 10.5 million tonnes.
Following the launch of the EFRA Project units, the processing margin is expected to increase by about USD 2 per barrel, and the refinery will become more flexible, to process more crude oil types and markedly reduce its heavy fuel oil output, while adjusting bitumen production to seasonal shifts in market demand. Petroleum coke will also be made as a new product.
Communications Office, Grupa LOTOS S.A., ul. Elbląska 135, 80-718 Gdańsk, Poland, tel. (+48) 58 308 87 31, (+48) 58 308 83 88, e-mail: media@grupalotos.pl
