Update – Three Refineries in MT hit by Power Outage

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Update – Three Refineries (Billings & Laurel) in Montana hit by Power Outage

HOUSTON, Oct 25, 2009 (Reuters) – Three refineries in Montana were hit by a brief power outage that struck the cities of Billings and Laurel on Friday night. A spokeswoman for the Cenex Harvest States refinery in Laurel said on Sunday the plant was back to planned operations.
Also affected by the brief outage were the ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil Corp refineries in Billings, according a report on the Billings Gazette website.
Safety flares at the three refineries were widely seen burning off hydrocarbons that refinery units were temporarily unable to process, the Gazette reported.
“It affected all three refineries in the area,” said Lani Jordan, spokeswoman for Cenex Harvest States. “As a normal procedure we had to flare. In our particular case, we shut down systems for a short period of time. We are now back up and running as we were before the outage.”
Representatives from Exxon and Conoco were not immediately available to discuss refinery operations.
The Cenex Harvest States refinery has a throughput of 59,600 barrels per day (bpd). The Exxon refinery has a capacity of 60,000 bpd while the Conoco refinery runs at 58,000 bpd.
Laurel is located about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from Billings.

(Reporting by Erwin Seba; Editing by Diane Craft

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