Petrobras proceeds with sales process for US Pasadena refinery

HOUSTON (ICIS)–The sales process for Petrobras’s US refinery in Pasadena, Texas, has entered the non-binding phase, the Brazilian state energy producer said on Thursday.

During this phase, possible buyers that have signed confidentiality agreements will get more information about the refinery, Petrobras said. Those interested buyers will also get guidelines that explain how to prepare and submit non-binding proposals.

Petrobras operates the refinery as Pasadena Refining Systems Inc (PRSI). It has a throughput of 110,000 bbl/day and 5.1m bbl of storage. Its utilisation rate was 91% in 2017, it said. Its Nelson complexity rating is 9.4.

The table below shows the capacity (in bbl/day) of the various refining units of the complex.

Atmospheric distillation unit	110,000
Vacuum distillation unit	42,500
Fluid cataltyic cracking unit	52,000
Naphtha hydrotreating	26,000
Catalytic reformer	22,000

Source: Petrobras

The refinery has been one of the subjects of the Lava Jato corruption probe because of how much money Petrobras had spent to acquire it.

Petrobras agreed to buy 50% of the 100,000 bbl/day Pasadena refinery from the Belgium company, Astra Oil, in 2006, and bought the remaining stake in 2012, for a total of $1.25bn. Earlier in 2005, the refinery had been bought by Astra Oil for $42.5m.

Since then, the refinery has become the subject of a lawsuit filed by US environmental groups, who allege that it had released too much pollution into the air, violating federal regulations.