NEW YORK, Dec 8 (Reuters) - Canadian Oil Sands Ltd COS.TO
has moved up the timing of its turnaround of its 8-2 coker from
mid-2016 to improve throughput, it said on Tuesday, just days
after reports of an unexpected outage.
A build-up of coke deposit within the unit led to reduced
circulation, it said in a statement, adding that its production
estimate for 2015 is about 90 million barrels of synthetic
crude.
Year-to-date production through November 2015 is 83.2
million barrels, according to the company's website. That means
December production is expected to be around 6.8 million
barrels, or about 219,000 bpd.
The turnaround comes after Canadian light synthetic crude
prices jumped last week as traders familiar with operations said
a coker unit was shut unexpectedly at the 326,000 barrel per day
facility in northern Alberta.
It was not immediately known why the coker unit was shut
last week, and a company representative did not respond to a
request for comment at the time.
Syncrude is a mining and upgrading project, where mined oil
sands bitumen is upgraded into refinery-ready synthetic crude.
The operations are a joint venture of seven partners:
Canadian Oil Sands Ltd COS.TO , Suncor Energy Inc SU.TO ,
Imperial Oil Ltd IMO.TO , Nippon Oil subsidiary Mocal Energy
Ltd 5020.T , Murphy Oil Corp (N:MUR) MUR.N , China's Sinopec
600028.SS , and CNOOC subsidiary 0883.HK Nexen.