Bulgarian contracts for Uhde

– Engineering firm Uhde has won two contracts worth a total of around € 100 million from the Bulgarian company Lukoil Neftochim Bourgas, part of the Russian Lukoil petroleum group, to engineer and supply diesel and gasoline desulfurization plants at the Burgas refinery on the Black Sea. Capacities will be 1.6 million t/y of diesel and 1.1 million t/y of gasoline, and the plants are scheduled to come on stream in 2009. Uhde will provide detail engineering, equipment, construction support, commissioning supervision and operator training. The gasoline desulfurization plant will be based on an Axens process, while the diesel plant will use a Haldor Topsoe process. With a sulfur content of less than 10 ppm, future production will comply with the EU fuel directive that has been in force since 2005. The project thus marks the switch to low-sulfur fuels of one of the biggest refining companies in Bulgaria, which joined the European Union at the beginning of last year. “Innovative refining plants for lower-emission fuels make an important contribution to environmental relief. In the past seven years Uhde has successfully engineered and supplied clean fuels plants with a total capacity of more than 33 million tons of gasoline and diesel. This clearly underlines our competence in refining technology,” said Helmut Knauthe, Uhde Executive Board member responsible for the refining technologies division. Uhde is a company in the Technologies segment of the ThyssenKrupp Group, and has more than 4,400 employees worldwide.