Price hike in heavy fuel could possibly dictate 2020 plans for U.S. Refiners

MOSCOW (MRC) - U.S. refiners had a plan for 2020: use their complex operations to maximize profits by making products that would comply with new international laws capping sulfur content in shipping fuels, Reuters.

But after a series of unexpected market moves, heavy, sour crude oil processed by U.S. refiners has become more expensive, eating up hoped-for profit windfalls before they even materialized, forcing refiners to rethink plans to invest more in heavy crude processing units.

New regulations by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) will require ships globally to use fuels with a sulfur content below 0.5% beginning in 2020. Current shipping fuel is much dirtier, with a higher sulfur content.

The move was expected to make heavy crude oil cheap as most refiners worldwide shifted to lighter crudes that yield compliant lower-sulfur fuels - and benefit complex U.S. refiners that possess greater capability to break down that heavy crude into high-margin products.

Instead, global heavy crude supplies have become scarce due to sanctions on Venezuela, one of the world's biggest heavy producers, pipeline bottlenecks in Canada and OPEC output cuts. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries' April output fell to 30.23 million barrels per day (bpd), the lowest since 2015.

"The biggest single factor is the big loss of heavy crude," said Todd Fredin, executive vice president of supply, trading and logistics at Motiva Enterprises, which operates a 603,000 bpd operation in Port Arthur, Texas, the largest U.S. refinery. The benefit to complex refiners from the regulatory change "is going to be less than people thought," he said.

Heavy crude once fetched a big discount compared with light crude, but it has narrowed after sanctions on Iran and Venezuela. That weighed on first-quarter earnings for major independent refiners Valero Energy Corp and Phillips 66 .

Marathon Petroleum Corp this week halted plans to add a coking unit to its Garyville, Louisiana refinery that would have processed more heavy crude. Marathon said the coker, which was expected to come online in 2021, was no longer financially viable due to narrowed spreads.

U.S. refiners rely on cokers to break down residual oils into other refined products, including gasoil and naphtha. Refineries without that capability typically process more light crude, produced in abundance by the United States, versus heavy crude, which U.S. refiners have to import.

The price difference between U.S. Gulf Coast grades Louisiana Light Sweet (LLS) and Mars, the best proxy for comparing light, sweet and heavy, sour crude in the U.S. Gulf, has narrowed in the last few months.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Anadarko Petroleum Corp said that its board backed a USD38 billion bid from Occidental Petroleum Corp, adding pressure on rival Chevron Corp to raise its offer or walk away from the takeover contest, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.

Occidental submitted a new offer of USD76 per share to Anadarko on Sunday, structured as 78 percent cash and 22 percent stock, as opposed to an even cash/stock split previously, removing a requirement for any deal to receive the approval of Occidental’s shareholders.

Anadarko said its board has unanimously determined that the revised Occidental proposal constitutes a “superior proposal” and that it intends to terminate the Chevron merger agreement and will pay Chevron a USD1 billion termination fee.

In the late April Anadarko Petroleum Corporation announced that it intends to resume negotiations with Occidental Petroleum Corporation in response to Occidental's proposal to acquire Anadarko, which was announced by Occidental on April 24, 2019 (the "Occidental Proposal").

Evercore and Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC are acting as financial advisors to Anadarko. Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz is acting as legal advisor to Anadarko.
MRC

MOSCOW (MRC) -- Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi said there was no link between an initial oil agreement his government was about to sign with Exxon Mobil and its receipt of waivers from the United States exempting it from sanctions on Iran, reported Reuters.

Media reports had quoted Iran’s ambassador in London on Monday saying the US would grant waivers to Iraq allowing it to deal with Iran economically in exchange for Baghdad signing an oil deal with Washington.

Iraq is close to signing a USD53 billion, 30-year agreement with Exxon Mobil and PetroChina to develop oil infrastructure in the south, Abdul Mahdi said, part of an energy megaproject.

Iraq currently has a waiver from the US allowing it to import gas from Iran. US President Donald Trump pulled out last year from a nuclear deal with Tehran and reinstated sanctions against it.

As MRC wrote before, in October 2017, ExxonMobil Chemical Company commenced production on the first of two new 650,000 tons-per-year high-performance polyethylene (PE) lines at its plastics plant in Mont Belvieu, Texas. The full project, part of the company’s multi-billion dollar expansion project in the Baytown area and ExxonMobil’s broader Growing the Gulf expansion initiative, will increase the plant’s polyethylene capacity by approximately 1.3 million tons per year.

ExxonMobil is the largest non-government owned company in the energy industry and produces about 3% of the world's oil and about 2% of the world's energy.
MRC

MOSCOW (MRC) -- Mitsui Chemicals, a part of the Mitsui conglomerate, has restarted its naphtha cracker following an unplanned outage, as per Apic-online.

A Polymerupdate source in Japan informed that the company has planned to resume operations at the cracker last weekend. The cracker was shut in end-April, 2019 owing to power failure.

Located at Chiba in Japan, the cracker has an ethylene capacity of 600,000 mt/year and propylene capacity of 331,000 mt/year.

As MRC informed earlier, Mitsui Chemicals took its naphtha-fed steam cracker in Sakai off-stream for a maintenance turnaround in mid-June 2018. It remained under maintenance until end-July 2018. Located in Sakai, Japan, the cracker has an ethylene production capacity of 500,000 mt/year and propylene production capacity of 280,000 mt/year.

Mitsui Chemicals is a leading manufacturer and supplier of value added specialty chemicals, plastics and materials for the automotive, healthcare, packaging, agricultural, building, and semiconductor and electronics markets. Mitsui Chemicals is a Japanese Chemicals company, a part of the Mitsui conglomerate. The company has a turnover of around 15 billion USD and has business interests in Japan, Europe, China, Southeast Asia and the USA. The company mainly deals in performance materials, petro and basic chemicals and functional polymeric materials.
MRC

MOSCOW (MRC) -- India’s Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd will operate its 300,000 barrels-per-day refinery in southern India at about 50 percent capacity due to water shortage, reported Hydrocarbonprocessing with reference to Managing Director M Venkatesh.

"We are maximizing sewage water to sustain the operation to an extent possible," Venkatesh said on Wednesday.

The refinery has three crude units. A 60,000 bpd crude unit and some secondary units are already shut for routine maintenance, Venkatesh said, adding that his firm will shut another 96,000 bpd crude unit and a hydrocracker from Thursday.

MRPL is trying to keep the third crude unit of 142,000 bpd capacity operating for at least a month. The crude unit normally operates at a rate of about 160,000 bpd.

MRPL will meet all its commitments for fuel supply despite shutdown of half of its crude-processing capacity, Venkatesh added.

The company supplies oil products mostly to meet fuel demand in southern India.

"Considering the acute shortage of fresh water in the river Nethravathi, in absence of summer showers, MRPL Refinery Complex process units are under partial shutdown as a force majeure," MRPL said in a stock exchange filing on Wednesday.

As MRC wrote before, in June 2015, MRPL successfully commenced commercial production of PP from its polypropylene plant as part of its phase-III refinery expansion and upgradation project in Mangaluru. The plant has a capacity to produce 4,40,000 tonnes of PP per annum. Feedstock for the PP plant - polymer grade propylene - is being produced from upstream petrochemical fluidised catalytic cracking unit of the refinery. Technology provider for the PP plant is Novolen of Germany. The plant has been engineered and constructed by Engineers India Ltd.

Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Limited (MRPL), is an oil refinery at Mangalore and is a subsidiary of ONGC, set up in 1993. The refinery is located at Katipalla, north from centre of Mangalore city. The refinery was established after displacing five villages of Bala, Kalavar, Kuthetoor, Katipalla, and Adyapadi.
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