OREANDA-NEWS. The Gazprom Neft Omsk Oil Refinery has begun the wide-ranging modernisation of its rail-tank-car loading facilities for oil products. The project is being implemented as part of a comprehensive ecological programme at the plant, with a new airtight filling and packaging system being implemented at the plant’s Crude and Raw Materials Depot No. 2 (TSB-2), from which approximately 65 percent of the plant’s finished oil products are despatched.

Airtight tank-car loading rack for oil products, with vapour condensation technology, will replace open tank-car loading gallery, guaranteeing safety in the shipment of oil products, allowing the full automation of the production process, and increasing production efficiency: following reconstruction of the loading rack, average daily shipments of oil products are expected to increase by 30 percent. Total loading capacity will increase from 3.3 million to 5.2 million tonnes per year, with TSB-2 despatching more than 12 million tonnes of oil products every year.

The introduction of new technologies will result in significant environmental benefits, with the planned airtight system reducing the atmospheric emission of petroleum vapours by 96 percent. The technological design of the new system allows petroleum vapours, emitted while tank cars are being filled with gasoline, diesel or aviation kerosene, to be converted into liquid condensate, collected in a special tank and returned to the secondary-refining production cycle by being pumped into crude oil.

Approximately 70 percent of oil products from the Omsk Refinery are currently transported by rail. TSB-2, equipped with three loading racks, plays a key role in commodity production at the Omsk Refinery, responsible for the shipment of highly popular high-performance Euro-5 gasolines and diesel fuels. Work on the technical re-tooling of the loading rack is expected to be completed by the end of 2017.