MOSCOW (MRC) -- PetroChina's subsidiary refinery, Dalian Petrochemical Corp, plans to have a major turnaround in April-May of 2020, four industry sources told Reuters, reported Hydrocarbonprocessing.
The maintenance is scheduled to start from late March or early April and will last for around one and a half months, the sources said.
The 410,000 barrels-per-day (bpd) plant in the northeast Chinese port city of Dalian, PetroChina's biggest refinery, is linked to Russia's East Siberia Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline and is China's largest processor of the pipeline ESPO blend crude.
PetroChina did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Russian state oil giant Rosneft supplies 30 million tonnes of oil annually, or 600,000 bpd, via the pipeline to China under a term contract.
According to two sources familiar with the matter, pipeline crude supplies from Russia will be slightly lower in April-May 2020 as a result of the maintenance.
PetroChina may divert the ESPO blend flows to other plants in the region such as Liaoyang and Jilin, which are also linked to the pipeline, a third source said.
As MRC wrote previously, Sichuan Petrochemical (part of PetroChina) undertook an emergency shutdown at its naphtha cracker in Sichuan province of China on July 11, 2018 owing to a gas leak at its natural gas supply pipeline. Further details on duration of the outage could not be ascertained. Located at Sichuan province of China, the cracker has an ethylene capacity of 800,000 mt/year.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,724,670 tonnes in the first ten months of 2019, up by 7% year on year. Shipments of all PE grades increased. The estimated PP consumption in the Russian market in January-October 2019 totalled 1,066,520 tonnes, up by 7% year on year. Supply of block copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymer) and homopolymer of propylene (homopolymer PP) increased, demand for statistical copolymers (PP random copolymer) decreased.
PetroChina Company Limited, is a Chinese oil and gas company and is the listed arm of state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation, headquartered in Dongcheng District, Beijing. It is China's biggest oil producer.
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