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| Arabia |
| Kuwaiti oil refinery blast sparks fire |
| 2006-11-04 |
| An explosion rocked Kuwait's smallest oil refinery on Saturday, sparking a fire that shut the facility, the Kuwait National Petroleum Company said. No injuries were reported. Investigators were looking into the cause of the blast at the Shuaiba installation south of Kuwait city, but terrorism was not suspected, said Mohammad al-Ajami, a company spokesman. And why not? Refineries do explode for non-terrorist reasons, but they have to be prime terrorist targets too, so why wouldn't you at least suspect terrorists? More than 800 people were evacuated and the fire burned for three hours before firefighters extinguished it, he said. Shuaiba is the smallest of Kuwait's three oil refineries, with a capacity of 200,000 barrels per day. Al-Ajami said the explosion occurred in the refinery's heavy oil unit, which had a capacity of 25,000 barrels per day. Al-Ajami said parts of the refinery with a capacity of some 120,000 barrels per day remained operational, and the refinery would be "back to normal," except for the heavy oil unit, in about two days. It was unclear if the refined oil was for domestic consumption or overseas sale. Kuwait has three refineries — all in the emirate's oil-rich southern region — which have a combined refining capacity of 915,000 barrels per day. The small state on the western shore of the Persian Gulf pumps around 2.6 million barrels of oil per day. |
| Posted by:Glenmore |
| #1 Stupid headline. Of course it did! What's next? "Huge Fart Produces Smelly Cloud, Clears Newsroom?" |
| Posted by: mojo 2006-11-04 13:34 |