Qatar Petroleum to supply condensate to ExxonMobil Singapore complex

MOSCOW (MRC) -- QPSPP, Qatar Petroleum’s marketing arm, has executed a 5-year agreement to supply 6 million bbl of low-sulfur condensate to ExxonMobil Asia Pacific’s integrated manufacturing complex in Singapore, according to OGJ.

Qatar Petroleum for the Sale of Petroleum Products Co. (QPSPP), the marketing arm of Qatar Petroleum, has executed a 5-year agreement to supply 6 million bbl of low-sulfur condensate to ExxonMobil Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd.’s integrated manufacturing complex in Singapore, which has a crude oil processing capacity of 592,000 b/d and includes two steam crackers.

The 5-year sales agreement, which began in July, is the first condensate long-term sale to an end-user in Singapore, highlighting QPSPP’s push for more direct sales with established end users, QPSPP said.

Further details regarding the deal were not disclosed.

The long-term sales agreement follows a series of recently completed refining and upcoming petrochemical projects at ExxonMobil’s Singapore integrated manufacturing complex, the company’s largest.

As MRC informed 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.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- PetroChina Co , Asia’s largest oil and gas producer, said on Thursday first half 2019 net profit rose 3.6% from a year earlier, driven up by increasing crude oil and natural gas sales, said Reuters.

For the first six months of 2019, the company earned 28.42 billion yuan ($4.01 billion), up from 27.44 trillion for the same period last year, PetroChina said in a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange. Total revenue for the state-backed company was 1.12 trillion yuan, up 6.8% from the same period in 2018.

Profit for the April to June quarter was 18.17 billion yuan, the highest since the third quarter last year, according to calculations by Reuters based on the earnings filing. That compares with 16.94 billion yuan in the same period a year earlier and 10.25 billion yuan in the first quarter of this year.

Over the first six months of 2019, PetroChina produced a total of 451.9 million barrels, or 2.5 million barrels per day, up 3.2% from the same period in 2018. While natural gas output increased 9.7% to 1.96 trillion cubic feet, or 55.5 billion cubic metres.

It also reported a 3.1% increase in crude oil throughput at its refineries to 597.4 million barrels, or 3.3 million barrels per day.

With Beijing’s push to boost domestic energy production, PetroChina invested 12.27 billion yuan in upstream exploration in the first half of 2019, 14% more compared to the same period last year.

Chinese energy companies have said they plan to raise spending on domestic drilling this year to the highest since 2016 to safeguard the country’s energy security.

PetroChina earlier this month started to drill its first shale oil well in China’s southwestern province of Sichuan and vowed to double natural gas output in the region to 50 billion cubic metres by 2025.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Indian Oil Corp sold a naphtha cargo, bringing its total August exports to 97,000 tons, the highest monthly volume from the port of Chennai since 2015, reported Reuters with reference to three industry sources.

IOC sold the 35,000-tonne naphtha cargo for Aug. 28-30 loading from Chennai to commodity trader Trafigura at a premium of about USD17 a tonne to its own price formula on a free-on-board (FOB) basis after extending the validity of the sales tender by a day, the sources said.

It was unclear why IOC’s August exports were higher than its average monthly volume for the first seven months of this year at 55,000 tons.

But of the three cargoes it sold for August, one cargo at 27,000 tons sold to Litasco at a premium of USD2 for Aug. 3-5 lifting was not within the usual specifications, the sources said.

The other cargo sold for Aug. 16-18 went to BP at a premium of about USD13 a tonne, one of the sources said.

Companies do not typically comment on such deals.

As MRC wrote before, Indian Oil Corporation's Rs 34,555-crore 15 million tonnes per annum Paradip Refinery was commissioned in phases from March 2015 onwards. Indian Oil Corporation was conducting feasibility studies to set up a petrochemical complex at Paradip in Odisha for Rs 20,000 crore. The petrochemical complex will be built in the vicinity of the company’s to-be-commissioned 15-mln tpa greenfield refinery at Paradip. The petrochemical complex will be in addition to the already announced Rs 3,150-crore polypropylene project at the same location, the foundation stone for which was laid by MOS for petroleum and natural gas.

Indian Oil Corporation Limited, or IndianOil, is an Indian state-owned oil and gas corporation with its headquarters in New Delhi, India.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- JSC EuroChem Northwest, a division of EuroChem Group, has commissioned its 2,890-tonne/day ammonia plant in Kingisepp, Russia, said Ogj.

The ammonia plant—Europe’s largest single-train production site—produces 1 million-tonnes/year of ammonia using KBR Inc.’s proprietary Purifier ammonia technology, KBR said.

Alongside technology licensing, KBR said it also provided basic engineering design for the $1-billion project, as well as various digital solutions including its proprietary remote-operations monitoring and expert-advisory service Ammonia InSite, a virtual 3D graphics-embedded operator training simulator and e-learning system, and a reliability-based maintenance system.

EuroChem Northwest said it also let earlier contracts to Maire Tecnimont SPA subsidiaries Tecnimont SPA and Tecnimont Russia OOO to provide engineering, procurement, and construction of the ammonia plant, which—built on a brownfield site—features a closed-water recycling system to prevent effluent discharges into the nearby Luga River that flows into the Baltic Sea in the Gulf of Finland, according to the operator’s web site.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Amcor PET bottlesAmcor has recently announced that it has designed the first polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles for pasteurized beer in Brazil. The company has used its leading-edge design technology to develop these bottles, said Plasticsinsight.

Amcor has custom-designed 600-milliliter containers for beverage maker, New Age Bebidas of Leme in Sao Paulo. The bottles feature the beauty of a glass-like and champagne-style base combined with the convenience of lightweight and shatter-resistant PET.

The design from Amcor showcases New Age Bebidas’s Salzburg craft beer brand and differentiates it from the standard glass bottle designs. Featuring a crown metal cap and replicating the standard glass bottle, the PET containers from Amcor are a replacement for glass during the filling and capping process. It withstands the internal pressure and high-heat conditions of the tunnel pasteurization process.

Amcor uses an oxygen scavenger barrier additive to prevent oxygen ingress and egress, providing up to four months of shelf life. The bottle is compatible with existing recycling streams and is 100% recyclable. The lightweight containers significantly reduce transportation costs, besides energy and carbon dioxide (CO2) emission reductions along the supply chain.

Talking about the market scenario, Felipe Salles, Business Development Director for Amcor in Brazil, says, “As the craft beer market grows, we are partnering with brewers to achieve attractive designs and cost savings with PET bottles, while also meeting shelf-life requirements."

Highlighting the characteristics of the new PET bottles, Rodolfo Salles, Research and Development Manager for Amcor in Brazil, stresses, “PET bottles offer design advantages over glass while being lighter weight, more easily and safely portable, and unbreakable, and provide the required barrier protection."

Showing his excitement on the new bottles, Fabio Violin, President of New Age Bebidas, observes, “Innovation and differentiation are the name of the game in the craft beer market in Brazil.” The flexibility of PET packaging allows us to develop a unique replacement for glass that will deliver broad consumer appeal throughout Latin America, adds Fabio.

New Age Bebidas introduced the new beer packaging format at the Amcor stand during the Fispal Tecnologia show held in late June 2019 at Sao Paulo, besides undertaking a pre-market trial in select cities in the state of Sao Paulo.

Amcor works with leading companies around the world to protect their products differentiate brands, besides improving value chains through a range of flexible and rigid packaging including specialty cartons, closures, and services. The company is focused on making packaging that is increasingly light-weighted, recyclable and reusable, and is made by using a rising amount of recycled content. Presently, Amcor has operations at 250 locations in 40-plus countries.

Having started its operations in 1988 as a small producer and distributor of international beverage brands, today, New Age Bebidas sells more than 300 beverage products including soft drinks, energy drinks, ices, vodka, cachaca, premium beers and various varieties of juices and teas.
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