MOSCOW (MRC) -- Oil tanks at France’s storage and dispatch services company CIM are completely full due to the glut in global oil supply and the sharp drop in products demand, the director general of the company said, as per Reuters.
CIM, which handles around 40% of France’s crude imports, has 3 million cubic metres of crude storage capacity and 1.7 million cubic metres of refined products storage capacity, mostly at the Le Havre oil port hub. The firm also operates the 4,700 km Trapil pipeline network. “There is no demand, our tanks are full to the brim,” CIM’s Olivier Peyrin told Reuters.
Measures put in place by governments to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus outbreak have led to a sharp drop in fuel demand globally.
“Petrol demand has fallen by around 80% (in France), while jet fuel demand has tumbled by around 95%,” Peyrin said, with air traffic at France’s two major airports Orly and Charles De Gaulle, close to a standstill.
“I’ve never witnessed a crisis like this,” said Peyrin, who worked for oil major Shell before joining CIM in 2010.
“Before the crisis, we generally used to receive around 2 million tonnes of crude per month. Today we are at about 1 million tonnes,” he said. “For refined products, we use to handle 500,000 tonnes per month, now we are falling towards zero."
Peyrin said only one of three oil refineries supplied by CIM from Le Havre, Exxon Mobil Port-Jerome Gravenchon, was still operational. Total’s Gonfreville Normandy refinery has been halted following a fire, while the restart of its Grandpuits has delayed.
"We have reduced the team at Le Havre to a minimum just to receive the few deliveries we get, and expedite some refined products,” Peyrin said, adding that other storages facilities in France were in a similar situation.
As MRC reported earlier, South Africa’s largest refinery SAPREF will “minimize” maintenance to critical activities, a spokeswoman said, as a national lockdown looms to contain the spread of coronavirus. SAPREF, situated near Durban along the east coast, is a 50/50 joint venture between BP and Shell with a refining capacity of around 8.5 million tons a year. It accounts for 35% of the refining capacity in Africa’s most advanced economy, which is a net importer of petroleum products.
We also remind that the COVID-19 outbreak has led Shell Chemical to temporarily suspend construction on the massive plastics and petrochemicals site it's building in Monaca, Pa, USA.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 383,760 tonnes in the first two month of 2020, up by 14% year on year. High density polyethylene (HDPE) and linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) shipments increased due to the increased capacity utilisation at ZapSibNeftekhim. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 192,760 tonnes in January-February 2020, down by 6% year on year. Homopolymer PP accounted for the main decrease in imports.
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