Exxon's Baton Rouge Refinery Restarts Last CDU Shut by February Fire

Exxon Mobil Corp on Monday night restarted the last crude distillation unit (CDU) that had been shut by a Feb 12 fire at its 502,500 barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, said sources familiar with plant operations.

The 90,000-bpd PSLA-7 CDU was the last of the refinery’s four CDUs to return to production after being idled by a fire in a natural gas pipeline that supplied fuel to the heaters on the CDUs, the sources said.

Exxon spokesman Jeremy Eikenberry declined to discuss the status of individual units at the Baton Rouge refinery.

Most of the refinery’s units have restarted as the CDUs returned to production last week and this week, the sources said.

The CDUs do the primary breakdown of crude oil into feedstocks for all other production units at the refinery.

(Reporting by Erwin Seba; Editing by Jason Neely and Bernadette Baum)