Shell Deer Park gasoline unit outage not due to storms -sources

(Adds Shell statement, details on outage)

HOUSTON, April 19 (Reuters) - The shutdown on Monday of the key gasoline-producing unit at Royal Dutch Shell Plc (Xetra: A0ET6Q - news) 's joint-venture refinery in the Houston suburb of Deer Park, Texas, was unrelated to storms that pounded the area with heavy rains that day, said sources familiar with plant operations.

The 70,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) fluidic catalytic cracking unit (FFCU) at the 316,600-bpd refinery was shut due to the breakdown of a key component called the expander, the sources said.

"This happened before the rain," one of the sources said.

A Shell (LSE: RDSB.L - news) spokesman confirmed that the outage of a process unit at the refinery on Monday was not due to severe weather.

In statements on Monday and Tuesday, the company said, "Shell Deer Park recently experienced a failure to part of a process unit. The unit will be shutdown to carry out the repair. All other units are operational."

Sources have told Reuters the repairs to the expander on the FCCU will take up to six weeks to complete. The expander takes heat from the process of refining gas oil into gasoline and uses it to power the unit's operation.

The Deer Park refinery is a 50-50 joint venture between Shell and Mexico's national oil company Petroleos Mexicanos . (Reporting by Erwin Seba; Editing by Sandra Maler and Jonathan Oatis)