Shaun Polczer, CALGARY: In the latest of a series of unplanned oil-sands outages, Canadian Natural Resources (CNRL) has been forced to shut its 110,000 barrels a day (b/d) Horizon mine for more than a month.
The company halted operations at the sprawling mine site, north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, on 5 February, following an incident in a fractionation unit that separates cracked hydrocarbons from an adjacent coker. It was initially expected to be back up and running in days, but on 11 February, CNRL said it “determined the damage to be somewhat more extensive than originally thought” and doesn’t expect to resume full production until mid-March.
It’s the second shut down in a year, after a fire and explosion at the Horizon site last January injured five workers and halted production for eight months. The cause of that blast was identified as related to...