New Delhi: Indian Oil Corp (IOC) has deferred a planned shutdown of half of its 240,000 barrels-per-day Panipat refinery in north India by a month to end-October, a company source said on Tuesday.

He said IOC would shut a 120,000 bpd crude unit and a 2.4 million tonnes per year (tpy) delayed coker for about 21 days while a 1.7 million tpy hydrocracker and a 3.5 million tpy diesel hydrotreater (DHDT) would be offline for about a month.

“This will be the phase-I shutdown for raising the refinery capacity to 15 million tonnes (300,000 bpd) next year. The shutdown will begin in last week of October,” the official, who did not wish to be identified, told Reuters.

The source also said during the shutdown the crude unit would be revamped to handle 25% more crude while the DHDT would be enabled to produce Euro IV compliant diesel.

“Coker will also be revamped during the shutdown period so that after the second phase shutdown it can process at 3 million tonnes a year,” he said, adding a catalyst in the hydrocracker would be changed in the shutdown period.

During the shutdown, IOC would carry out minor work at some of the secondary units, including a 650,000 tpy Continuous Catalytic Reformer Unit, a 950,000 tpy Fluid Catalytic Cracker and a 400,000 tpy Visbreaker, the source added.

IOC’s head of refineries B. N. Bankapur last month said IOC would shut a 120,000 bpd crude unit for about 30-35 days in July-August 2010 to raise the refinery capacity to 300,000 bpd.

The Panipat plant has two equal-sized crude units.

IOC operates about 10 refineries across India with a total capacity of 1.204 million bpd.