By Mario Naranjo and Diego Ore
CARACAS (Reuters) - A fire caused by lightning at Venezuela's 146,000-barrel-per-day El Palito refinery should be extinguished later Thursday and operations remained unaffected, state oil company PDVSA said.
In the latest accident on the OPEC member's troubled oil installation network, an electrical storm set fire to two naphtha storage tanks at El Palito in central Venezuela.
The incident revived painful memories of last month's disaster at the 645,000-bpd Amuay plant, the South American country's biggest oil refinery, when a gas leak caused an explosion that killed 42 people, injured dozens and damaged 1,600 homes.
PDVSA has suffered a string of accidents and outages across its refinery network in recent years. Critics say President Hugo Chavez's socialist government is under-investing in the oil industry because it diverts so much crude revenue to welfare programs.
Oil minister and PDVSA President Rafael Ramirez told state television the situation at El Palito was under control.
"Operations are normal," he said on Thursday morning from the scene. "We have not stopped a single refining process."
Some 120 firemen were at the refinery, and had extinguished flames at the larger tank. The other fire was "controlled and confined," he added. "We think it will be extinguished today."
PDVSA said Venezuela's fuel inventories were at a "completely normal" level of 10-12 days.
Officials said the fire was some distance from production units at El Palito, and insisted there was no risk to local communities.
Last month's blast at the Amuay refinery was one of the global oil industry's worst accident in years. Firefighters battled blazes in storage tanks there for days.
"This is a totally different situation to Amuay," Ramirez added.
(Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
