
Your local crude oil refining skids questions









Today there are still some countries or large economical areas , producing their own crude oil, but exporting their entire production.

As nowadays no country can avoid burning oil products, this means that some countries export completely their crude oil production and import 100 % of their refined oil products needs. Sometimes for years, or ten years, or sometimes more.

The resulting money waste is difficult to believe




Local Economical Area

When oil products are used in an economical zone or area, 2 of them are more important: heavy fuel oil for energy power generating plant, diesel oil for industry and trucks, and also for private cars.

The necessary infrastructure exists in the right place of the economical area to achieve proper import of those main oil products and their distribution to the local consumers. In other words, the economical area or activity zone is already clear with the oil refined products as concerns the commercial importing step, the storage step, the pumping step, the local transport stepand distribution step.

Only one step is missing:


Local Crude Export / Overseas Refining / Oil Products Import


Refining Overseas vs Local Refining

Inside the local economical area, refining locally or overseas is changing some details but not the global cost of oil products storage, pumping and movements.

The refining process cost is about in the same range being operated here or there, as the main part is the percent of crude oil feed being burnt as necessary fuel for the various process units.
The great difference between overseas and local refining appears as an evidence if taking the local refining as a base for the comparison: to refine crude overseas, two transport costs have to be added: Sea tanker crude export plus land local transport to the overseas refinery. Refined oil products local land transport out of overseas refinery plus sea tanker import back to the economical area.

To give a range of costs, each of these two steps may be assumed : 3 US $/Bbl. With this assumption, refining overseas generates an immediate loss of:

# 6 US $/Bbl


Local Refining of Local Crude Oil


An Economical Area can be considered as follows:

An electricity generating thermal power plant is existing and supplying power to a large area of activity.

To feed that power plant with heavy fuel produced from processing local crude oil will determine the refining capacity of optimized skid mounted oil refining units.

The skid-mounted refining units will also produce diesel oil which will cover the needs of the associated diesel consumers area.

Those refinery skid units will produce also raw gasoline or naphtha which will be exported.


increased flexibility and low cost of local crude on spot refining


Local Refining Investment

As seen above the local economical area is already importing refined oil products and has its own infrastructure operating:

Refining crude oil feasibility does not mean a giant grass-roots refinery with own infrastructure and supplying oil products to various economical areas.

Only taylored process units sized exactly for the economical area needs are necessary. Let us assume that a 10.000 Bpsd mini-refinery designed to process the local crude would supply the necessary heavy fuel for the power plant (100 MW range).

Then, the main refinery process skid mounted units would be:

Atmospheric crude oil distillation (topping).
Naphtha stabilizer.
Gas-oil cut stripper.
Gas plant (LPG gas recovery).

Investment :

# US $ 25 Million


Local Refining Skid Mounted Units Pay-Out

Only considering the profits achieved when avoiding the useless transport costs (crude export and oil products import) the basic benefit for the 2 main refined oil products (heavy fuel-oil and motor diesel oil representing about 66% of crude feed) is:

6 US $/Bbl * 10.000 Bpsd * 0,66* 330 days/year # US $ 13 Million

Pay-out : < 2 years

lol refining skids questions