Refinery to begin CDU overhaul in April

MOSCOW (MRC) -- BP Plc plans to begin a planned overhaul of a crude distillation unit (CDU) at its 413,500 barrel-per-day (bpd) Whiting, Indiana, refinery in early April, a source said, as per Nytimes.

The overhaul of the 75,000 bpd CDU was postponed from March, the source said. The overhaul is expected to take at least a month to complete.

A BP spokesman declined on Friday to discuss operations at the Whiting refinery.

CDUs do the primary refining of crude oil into hydrocarbon feedstocks for all other units at the refinery. The Whiting refinery has three CDUs. The two smaller units each have a capacity of 75,000 bpd.

AS MRC informed earlier, BP bowed to pressure from investors, including the Church of England, by backing a plan to explain how its strategy and investments are consistent with the Paris climate agreement. The UK oil and gas company supported a resolution, put forward by a group of shareholders including the investment arms of HSBC, Legal & General and the C of E, forcing it to be more transparent on climate change. But BP urged investors to reject a tougher climate resolution brought by a Dutch shareholder activist group, which it said was too prescriptive.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Lyondell Basell Industries may keep production cuts at its 263,776 barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery for a week because of shipping disruptions in a key oil port from a chemical spill, sources said, as per Hydrocarbonprocessing.

Lyondell cut production by at least 14 percent following the shutdown of the upper Houston Ship Channel last week after a chemical spill on March 22 from Mitsui & Co’s Intercontinental Terminals Deer Park facility.

Lyondell spokeswoman Chevalier Gray said on Friday the company was contending with constrained barge and ship traffic. The Deer Park refinery, which is a 50-50 venture of Shell and Mexico’s national oil company Pemex, shut a vacuum distillation unit.

On Wednesday, ships began moving though the area of the channel contaminated by the spill. A crude oil tanker reached the Deer Park refinery on Wednesday, staving off a temporary shutdown because of a dwindling on-site crude supply. Shell spokesman Ray Fisher declined comment.

The Lyondell refinery has been receiving crude from a pipeline originating at the Texas City, Texas, terminal at the southern end of the channel, which is not affected by the spill, the sources said. Production was cut at the Lyondell refinery because barges could not haul away sulfur produced in the making of motor fuels.

Though barges began carting away sulfur on Wednesday, Lyondell wants to be sure it receives an adequate supply of the caustic chemicals needed to prevent the heavy, sour crude it processes from fouling distillation units, the sources said.

The Coast Guard, which oversees channel ship traffic, was aiming to increase the number of ships moving through the contaminated area, said Captain Kevin Oditt on Friday.

The Coast Guard hopes to move 49 vessels in and 18 ships out of the upper channel, Oditt said. Twenty-three ships, or about 50 percent of what usually transits the upper channel, moved through on Thursday.

Some adjacent areas of the waterway, which connects the Port of Houston to the Gulf of Mexico, remain closed, trapping more than 100 barges.

The Intercontinental Terminals Deer Park facility was the site of a massive fire last week in which 11 storage tanks containing gasoline blending stocks burned. The chemicals that spilled were released by the blaze.

As MRC wrote previously, in September 2016, LyondellBasell selected its La Porte, Texas, manufacturing complex as the site for a new high density polyethylene (HDPE) plant. The plant will be the first commercial plant to employ LyondellBasell's new proprietary Hyperzone PE technology and will have an annual capacity of 1.1 billion pounds (500,000 metric tons). Construction began in early 2017 with start-up planned for 2019.

LyondellBasell is one of the world's largest plastics, chemical and refining companies. The company manufactures products at 57 sites in 18 countries. LyondellBasell products and technologies are used to make items that improve the quality of life for people around the world including packaging, electronics, automotive parts, home furnishings, construction materials and biofuels. LyondellBasell sells products into approximately 100 countries and is the world's largest licensor of polyolefin technologies.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- French oil and gas major Total said that it will halt production from some units at its 220,000 barrels per day Donges refinery in western France, as per Reuters.

The maintenance is scheduled from the end of April to the end of June. Units scheduled for the triennial maintenance include the fluid catalytic cracker, a spokeswoman said.

The remaining units of the refinery are expected to undergo scheduled maintenance in 2021.

In February 2019, Saudi Aramco with its partner Total announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Daelim, a South Korean petrochemical company.

Total S.A. is a French multinational oil and gas company and one of the six "Supermajor" oil companies in the world with business in Europe, the United States, the Middle East and Asia. The company's petrochemical products cover two main groups: base chemicals and the consumer polymers (polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene) that are derived from them.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- China Petroleum & Chemical Corp (Sinopec) said its subsidiary refinery Jiujiang Petrochemical Corp produced its first on-spec product from a newly started alkylation facility, as part of the country’s push for cleaner gasoline, as per Reuters.

The 300,000-tonne-per-year ionic liquid alkylation facility completed mechanical construction last December, making it the largest scale of its kind in the country, Sinopec said on its parent company’s website.

Alkylation facility produces a gasoline-blending component that is low in sulphur, high in octane value and zero in olefin and aromatics.

The refinery in the eastern province of Jiangxi is situated along the Yangtze river. It processed about 140,000 barrels of crude oil per day in 2017.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Citgo Petroleum is seeking to raise USD1.8 billion through a three-year term loan to cover operating expenses and to refinance existing debt, reported Reuters with reference to three people.

The financing would help Citgo, the US-based subsidiary of Venezuelan state-run oil firm PDVSA, fund operations and replace an existing revolving credit line, following US sanctions and its split from the parent company, which remains under control of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and a military-led management team.

As MRC informed before, in late February 2019, Houston-based Citgo Petroleum slowed work on an overhaul of its 235 Mbpd Aruba refinery due to a lack of financing stemming from US sanctions on Venezuela's state-run PDVSA.
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