India's BPCL to shut Kochi refinery units in Nov

NEW DELHI, Sept 4 (Reuters) - India's state-run Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd (BPCL.BO) will shut some units at its Kochi refinery in southern India for planned maintenance in November, with a 90,000-bpd crude distillation unit (CDU) closing for about a month, a top official said.

Earlier a company official, who could not be named, told Reuters in Singapore maintenance would begin in October.

"We will shut down a 4.5 million tonnes a year CDU and a 1.75 million tonnes a year FCCU for about 25 to 30 days from November 15," BPCL's director of refineries, R.K. Singh, told Reuters in a telephone interview from Mumbai.

"It is a planned maintenance."

Singh said a 2.5 million tonnes a year diesel hydro de-sulphurisation unit would be offline for a fortnight from Nov. 1 so the catalyst could be changed.

BPCL recently bought one million barrels of Nigerian crude Forcados for October lifting for the 150,000 bpd Kochi plant. (Reporting by Nidhi Verma, Editing by Mark Williams)