MOSCOW (MRC) -- Taiwan’s Formosa Petrochemical Corp is looking to keep its June throughput at its Mailiao refinery at more than 90% of capacity, similar to May despite weaker refining margins, its spokesperson said, as per Reuters.
Formosa operates a 540,000 barrels-per-day (bpd) refinery in Mailiao, one of Asia’s larger refineries in terms of capacity. “We have already sold our gasoline and diesel for June. We also have crude intake commitments,” said KY Lin on why it was not workable to cut runs next month.
“If the market remains as weak as it is now in July, we will consider a small cut in refinery runs,” Lin said. Cuts, if any, would likely be small at between 5 and 10 percentage points, as the company still has to meet contractual obligations to buy crude and sell oil products, he said.
Some refineries in South Korea, Singapore and Thailand were planning to trim throughput from June as spring refining margins were at a 16-year low, with naphtha being the worse performing oil product.
Formosa also operates three naphtha crackers with a total annual ethylene capacity of 2.93 million tonnes, all of which are operating at full-tilt, according to Lin.
As MRC informed earlier, on 19 March, 2018, Formosa Petrochemical Corp (FPCC) undertook an emergency shutdown at its No. 1 cracker in Mailiao owing to technical issues. The plant remained off-line for around one day. Located at Mailiao in Taiwan, the No. 1 cracker has an ethylene production capacity of 700,000 mt/year, propylene production capacity of 350,000 mt/year and butadiene production capacity of 109,000 mt/year.
Formosa Petrochemical is involved primarily in the business of refining crude oil, selling refined petroleum products and producing and selling olefins (including ethylene, propylene, butadiene and BTX) from its naphtha cracking operations. Formosa Petrochemical is also the largest olefins producer in Taiwan and its olefins products are mostly sold to companies within the Formosa Group. Among the company's chemical products are paraxylene (PX), phenyl ethylene, acetone and pure terephthalic acid (PTA). The company"s plastic products include acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) resins, polystyrene (PS), polypropylene (PP) and panlite (PC).
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