MOSCOW (MRC) - California's largest oil refinery began cutting production on Wednesday as the push to end the spread of coronavirus destroyed demand for motor fuels in the Los Angeles area, according to sources familiar with plant operations, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.
Marathon Petroleum Corp MPC.N expects to make a dramatic cut in production at its Los Angeles Refinery, the sources said, to bring costs in line with reduced demand. The exact amount of the planned cut was unknown on Wednesday night.
A Marathon spokesman was not immediately available for comment on Wednesday night.
The 363,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery, located in two adjoining plants in the Los Angeles suburbs of Carson and Wilmington, was the first U.S. refinery to report a coronavirus infection.
An employee at the refinery tested positive for the virus and, along with those who worked close by, went into quarantine on March 11.
On Wednesday, Marathon told California environmental regulators it was utilizing the safety flare system at the refinery, indicating a change in the level of production. The safety flare system is used to burn off excess hydrocarbons when units are shut or malfunction.
Marathon maintained regular production in the week after the worker went into quarantine.
The coronavirus has infected more than 200,000 people worldwide and over 8,700 of those have died. In the United States, more than 8,000 people have been infected and over 150 people have died.
As MRC wrote previously, a portion of Marathon Petroleum Corp’s 363,000 barrel-per-day Carson refinery in California was shut in late February 2020, following a fire.
We also remind that the gasoline-producing unit at Marathon Petroleum Corp’s 585,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) Galveston Bay Refinery in Texas City, Texas, remained shut for six weeks for repairs in late Juney-early August 2019. The 140,000-bpd gasoline-producing Fluidic Catalytic Cracking Unit 3 (FCCU 3) was shut on June 29 2019 to repair a leak. The refinery’s 65,000 bpd reformer, called Ultraformer 4, was also shut down.
Propylene is the main feedstock for the production of polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, PP shipments to the Russian market were 127,240 tonnes in January 2020, up by 33% year on year. ZapSibNeftekhim's homopolymer PP accounted for the main increase in shipments.
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