Guwahati, June 15: Numaligarh Refinery Limited (NRL) is expected to resume operations within the next few days on the completion of its diesel quality upgrade project.

The company today said the Rs 435-crore project, which will produce Euro III and IV grades of high-speed diesel at 100 per cent capacity utilisation of the refinery, was delayed by a month because of incessant rain.

The project required the refinery to be shut down for the last two months of its 24-month period for carrying out the final execution jobs.

An official in the refinery said the shutdown was planned from March 1 but was postponed to March 16 following requests from the oil industry and was scheduled to be completed by May 15. “However, because of unprecedented and incessant rain and adverse weather conditions prevailing in the state during the project execution period, one month of valuable time was lost as major project activities like erection of equipment, welding and radiography cannot be carried out during rain. As a result, the completion of the project got unavoidably delayed by a month,” he said.

The official said the mother unit, which is the crude distillation unit, was commissioned on May 22 with a delay of around seven days only at 50 per cent capacity.

The other major unit, hydrogen, has already been commissioned and the hydrocracker unit, which is the last revamp unit, was mechanically completed on June 9. It is under commissioning and will be fully operational within the next few days.

“Once all the facilities are fully commissioned, the NRL will be in a position to receive higher quantity of crude,” the official said. “We had planned for the shutdown well in advance and that is why there is no shortage of products in the market,” he added.

The official said the company had recorded a crude throughput of 2.62 million metric tonnes during 2009-10, which is the highest ever in the history of its operations.

The ONGC Assam Asset yesterday said it had suffered heavy production losses during the NRL’s shutdown.

The ministry of petroleum and natural gas allocates crude to all the refineries at the beginning of each financial year for which there is a co-ordination procedure amongst the oil producers and refineries of the Northeast to avoid problems.

A crude co-ordination meeting is held at the beginning of every month. After considering the projected crude production, tankage availability, refinery’s production target, shutdown and other plans, it jointly decides the crude allocation to the refineries for the month and plans for the next two months within the overall allocation by the ministry.