A fire forced Valero Energy Corp to shut both crude units at its 180,000 barrel-per-day refinery in Memphis, Tennessee, on Friday, but there were no injuries and one unit could resume quickly. A heater explosion on the 80,000-bpd east crude unit at 7:25 am CDT (1225 GMT) caused the shutdown of the two crude units. A power outage prior to the explosion had taken all other production units offline at the refinery, spokesman Bill Day said.
The fire, currently under investigation, was extinguished in about 25 minutes, according to Day. The fire could delay the restart of the other production units knocked out of operation by a transformer failure hours before the fire broke out, sources familiar with refinery operations said. Day said it was unclear if the early morning power outage was related to the fire on the crude unit.
"The cause of the fire is under investigation, and the crude units remain shut. We do not have an estimate at this time for the length of the outage," he said. There is a possibility of the west crude unit returning to service "fairly quickly," Day said.
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