TOKYO -- Firefighters have extinguished a major blaze at a northern Japanese oil refinery caused by a huge earthquake which pummeled the region on Friday, a company spokesman said.

No one was injured in the fire at the Idemitsu Kosan Co. Ltd refinery in the Pacific Coast city of Tomakomai, Hokkaido island, which took seven hours to put out, according to company spokesman Shoichi Nishida.

Japanese television pictures at the height of the blaze, which took place in a 30,000-kiloliter (7.8 million-gallon) crude oil storage tank, showed huge orange flames and a thick plume of black smoke, before the fire was put out at 12:09 P.M. (0309 GMT).

The refiner now has to wait for local authorities to finish their investigations and issue permission to resume the 24-hour refining process, Nishida said.

"The refinery is operable without the damaged tank, but it is uncertain when we will resume operations there," said Mitsushi Kobayashi, another Idemitsu spokesman.

The medium-sized refinery with capacity to produce 140,000 barrels per day (bpd) was shut down as soon as the fire broke out at 04:58 A.M., minutes after the first quake shook wide areas of northern Japan at 04:50 am and caused power blackouts on Hokkaido island, AFP reported.

The total capacity of refineries owned by Idemitsu in Japan is 640,000 bpd, compared with the overall Japanese refinery capacity of about 5.0 million bpd. Idemitsu, the second largest refiner in Japan in terms of product sales volume, is a privately owned company.

Nippon Oil, the largest refiner in Japan with 1.22 million bpd capacity, also has a refinery in Hokkaido, located at Muroran City along the Pacific Coast, but it was unaffected by the quake, a company spokesman said.