VIENNA (Reuters) -The petrochemical plant at Austrian oil and gas company OMV’s Schwechat refinery near Vienna suffered an outage on Tuesday, causing it to switch to high-flare operations that alarmed passersby and prompted calls to the fire brigade.
Schwechat is OMV’s biggest refinery, which the company describes as one of the biggest in Europe with capacity of 9.6 million metric tons of crude oil a year.
Petrochemicals company Borealis, majority owned by OMV and going through a merger, has its own production site adjoining the refinery.
The petrochemical plant at Schwechat experienced an “operational disruption” on Tuesday morning, an OMV statement said without specifying the cause or exact nature of the disruption.
“As an immediate measure, the high-level flare operation was initiated, following all necessary safety precautions. We are currently working hard to rectify the operational disruption,” OMV said, adding that running high flares was “a routine process”.
Earlier on Tuesday a spokesman for the fire brigade in Lower Austria, the state surrounding Vienna, said it had received an alert about a possible fire at the refinery. A passer by informed Reuters earlier on Tuesday that there were unusually tall flames at the refinery.
The fire brigade spokesman later said it was a false alarm owing to flaring at the plant.
Borealis was not immediately available for comment.
In an update in late afternoon after trading on the Vienna Stock Exchange had closed, OMV said repairs were ongoing.
“The operational disruption of the petrochemical plant is affecting production of petrochemical feedstock ethylene and propylene,” it said.
“The production of all fuels at the Schwechat refinery is not affected and fuel deliveries from the refinery continue to be fully guaranteed.”
(Reporting by Francois Murphy and Alexandra Schwarz-GoerlichEditing by David Evans and David Goodman)
