McKee Refinery
The McKee Refinery is an oil refinery owned by Valero Energy in Texas , USA . It is located between Dumas and Sunray , Moore County , 45 miles north of the city of Amarillo , in the center of the Texas Panhandle, and has 475 full-time employees.
An extensive network of pipelines supplies the refinery with crude oil from Oklahoma , north and west Texas, southwest Kansas and eastern Colorado and processes around 200,000 barrels a day. A large number of refined petroleum products such as liquefied petroleum gas , gasoline , diesel , kerosene , asphalt and soot oil as well as sulfur and sulfuric acid are produced . Customers in the southwest of the USA are supplied via six main pipelines.
The plant was commissioned by Shamrock Oil and Gas Company in 1933 and expanded and renewed in the 1950s and 1990s. The successor company Ultramar Diamond Shamrock sold the refinery in 2001 to Valero Energy, which carried out a further renovation in 2004.
Incidents
On July 29, 1956, a hexane / pentane mixture, which had been drained from the pressure relief valve of a storage tank, ignited . During the extinguishing work, the affected gas tank, one diesel tank and two oil tanks exploded, killing 19 firefighters and injuring over 30 people.
On February 16, 2007, liquid propane escaped through a damaged control pipeline , which ignited and caused a severe fire in the deasphalting plant . The refinery had to be evacuated and shut down for two months, and four employees were injured. The system was only operational again after around a year. The damage caused was given at around 50 million US dollars .
Web links
- McKee Refinery , Valero.com
Coordinates: 35 ° 57 '18 " N , 101 ° 52' 54" W.