HollyFrontier says Tulsa refinery operations not affected by fire

HOUSTON (Reuters) - HollyFrontier Corp said operations at the West plant of its 125,000 barrel-per-day Tulsa, Oklahoma, refinery, were not affected by a fire on Sunday morning and that there were no injuries. "The Refinery emergency response team was immediately mobilized and the fire was extinguished with no injuries or impact to plant operations," company spokeswoman Julia Heidenreich said in a statement. The fire broke out at 9 a.m. EDT, she said, not identifying in which unit it started. Twitter messages from Tulsa TV station KJRH first reported the blaze on Sunday morning. One of the messages showed what appeared to be a fire at a refinery. It was not possible to verify the time or location of the video. The fire did not appear to be near any of the major refinery units. While the Tulsa refinery is relatively small, its location near the Cushing, Oklahoma, oil storage hub makes it significant for oil markets. An extended unplanned outage could reduce demand for crude, potentially accelerating an expected buildup in surplus stockpiles at Cushing this autumn. (Reporting by Erwin Seba and Jarrett Renshaw; Editing by Gareth Jones and Peter Cooney)