Beijing: Petro-China's Dalian oil refinery, the company's biggest, is operating at a normal rate even as an oil spill closed nearby berths, because the plant relies on its own docks to ensure steady crude supplies and fuel shipments.

The plant is operating at 95 per cent of capacity, said a PetroChina official at Dalian who declined to be named because he is not authorised to speak to the media. The refinery can process 20.5 million metric tonnes a year of crude, or 410,000 barrels a day.

An explosion on July 16 in the Xingang zone at Dalian Port, which operates the nation's largest crude terminal, damaged oil pipelines and caused a slick that blanketed more than 183 square kilometres of sea. While some crude supplies come from Xingang, PetroChina's Dalian refinery relies on its own docks to receive cargoes, the official said.

The refinery's docks at Dalian can berth vessels of as much as 100,000 tonnes, he said. Larger ships can be diverted to ports in the eastern province of Shandong where supplies can be transferred to smaller tankers, if needed, the official said.

The Dalian plant also gets crude supplies by rail and road, and has enough crude stockpiles to meet seven days of processing, the official said.

China National United Oil Corp the oil trading unit of PetroChina, doesn't yet have plans to resell crude cargoes originally scheduled to unload in Dalian, said one of its traders, who declined to be named because of company rules.

Domestic ports

The other refinery in Dalian, the 200,000 barrel-a-day plant run by West Pacific Petrochemical Corp, has diverted some crude cargoes to other domestic ports because of the oil spill, said a trader at Sinochem Group who declined to be named because of company rules. Wepec, as the company is known, is jointly owned by PetroChina, Sinochem and France's Total.

Wepec gets about three crude cargoes a month through Dalian port, the trader said. The refinery has enough crude stockpiles for one week of use, he said.

The refinery cut oil-processing rates by 20 percent to about 140,000 barrels a day compared with pre-blast levels, according to research company C1 Energy, the Shanghai-based unit of CBI China Co, on July 19.