The UAE emirate of Fujairah restarted its only refinery after a shutdown of almost four years, a Fujairah Refinery Company official said.

“The refinery is now running with a capacity of 20,000 barrels per day, and this is the first phase of our plan to resume the refinery’s full production,” said FRC board member Salem Abdo Khalil.
“We are planning to up the capacity to 82,000 bpd, but we don’t know when we will do this,” he said.
The plant, mostly owned by Swiss-based oil trader Vitol, has been shut since March 2003 due to poor refinery margins.
Production had previously been interrupted from 1998 to 2000 after the plant’s former owner, Metro Oil, went bankrupt.
FRC has also started construction on 20 oil storage facilities at a total cost of $100 million, Abo Khalil said.
The new tanks will add 560,000 cubic metres (19.78 million cu ft) of capacity, taking the refinery’s total storage space to almost 1 million cubic metres, he said.
Fujairah, on the Gulf of Oman just outside the shipping chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz, is one of the world’s largest ship refuelling centres.
Around 20 per cent of global daily crude supply passes through the Strait.
The UAE is planning to build a large new refinery in Fujairah, with capacity of around 500,000 bpd.
It is also planning to build a 1.5 million bpd pipeline that will allow the UAE to export more than half of its crude exports from Fujairah, by-passing the Strait.