More full or partial closures of refineries have been announced in Europe as ExxonMobil evaluates the conversion of its Slagen refinery in Norway, says an article published in SPGlobal.
Essar Oil UK voices confidence in oil refinery
Essar Oil UK voiced confidence in the viability of the Stanlow oil refinery after reports of financial difficulty. It said it is increasing throughput on improving margins.
Essar said, “Stanlow had been historically very profitable and while all refiners had suffered difficulties due to the pandemic. We have successfully traded through a very difficult 12 months and are now seeing increased demand for road transport fuels and improving refining margins, which has resulted in increased throughput at the Stanlow Manufacturing Complex.”
Oil refineries and their current situation
- ExxonMobil said it is evaluating the conversion of its Slagen refinery in Norway into a fuel import terminal.The company said in a statement, “the basis for and timing of a potential conversion will be subject to consultation with employees and dialog with the relevant authorities.”
- Gunvor’s Rotterdam refinery has shuttered its two crude processing units, one in 2019 and the other one in 2020, and is developing new processes around hydrogen and co-processing of vegetable oil.
- France’s Grandpuits refinery said it would convert the refinery into a biofuels and plastics recycling complex, ending crude refining at the site in early 2021.
- Eni is evaluating the conversion of its Livorno refinery has already converted two of its Italian refineries and is looking to almost double its biorefining capacity to around 2 million mt/year by 2024, and expand this to at least five times by 2050.
- Portugal’s Galp said in a regulatory filing Dec. 21 that it will discontinue refining operations at the Porto refinery from 2021. The company intends to shift its entire refining operations to the larger 220,000 b/d Sines refinery, where it has an FCC and a hydrocracker.
- Croatia’s Rijeka refinery will optimize its operations from November and during that period will perform regular technological activities at process units such as catalyst regeneration and preparation of these plants for the new processing cycle in 2021 through regular maintenance work.
- France’s Donges refinery is expected to restart in June, most likely around mid-June, a source at the CGT union said April 12. The refinery had been operating at a loss, it said.
- One of the two distillation units at Cepsa’s La Rabida is currently idles but set to quickly resume operations if demand improves.
- Finland’s Neste said it had discontinued refining operations at its smaller Naantali refinery at the end of March. It said, “Neste will continue port and distribution terminal operations in Naantali.”
- Spain’s Bilbao had the smaller of its two CDUs offline since Nov. 20, 2020, and recently announced a temporary lay-off of one-third of its staff.
- Repsol said it will lay off up to 60% of the workforce, up to 618 workers, at its Puertollano refinery complex for up to six months citing weak demand.
- At A Coruna, Repsol intends to halt operations at its coker unit, with a capacity of 1.1 million mt/year. The company is temporarily laying off 31% of its staff at the A Coruna refinery due to the unprecedented decline in oil demand.
- One of the two distillation units at Cepsa’s La Rabida is currently idled but set to quickly resume operations in case of demand improvement.
- Germany’s Heide refinery will reduce its staff by 106 positions following intensive and constructive negotiations at the end of October.
- Shell has relaunched the sale of its Fredericia refinery in Denmark after suspending the sale in 2018.
- Israel’s Bazan said that its refinery in Haifa operated at 80% in 2020, compared with 94% in 2019. Its utilization was 75% in Q4, down from 88% in the year-ago period.
- Polish refiner Grupa Lotos ran its refinery at a 94.7% utilization rate in the fourth quarter of 2020 despite significant pressure on its refining margin, with sales of refined products in the quarter down by just 3.2% year on year to 2.687 million mt.
- Galp said that crude throughput at its Portuguese refineries fell 26% year on year to 19.7 million barrels of oil equivalent in the first quarter of 2021 after it halted operations at the smaller Matosinhos complex due to weak demand amid pandemic restrictions.
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Source: SPGlobal
