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MOSCOW (MRC) -- US crude oil imports
from Mexico surged to the highest level in more than eight years in the
second week of July as swelling inventories and a fire at the Latin American
country’s largest refinery in late June led it to offload more barrels, reported
Reuters.
US buyers boosted their
purchases by 834,000 barrels per day (bpd) to about 1.3 million bpd in the week
to July 3, the highest since February 2012, according to the Energy Information
Administration. The surge helped send U.S. net imports last week to the highest
since August 2019.
US Gulf Coast refiners including Lyondell Basell
Industries’ Houston refinery, Valero Energy Corp , Shell and Marathon Petroleum
Corp were among the buyers in recent weeks, according to market sources and
Refinitiv Eikon data.
The crude was delivered to 10 different terminals,
according to vessel-tracking firm ClipperData, with more than half the volumes
going to Shell’s Deer Park and Valero’s Port Arthur refineries.
Lyondell
Basell and Shell declined to comment. Valero and Marathon Petroleum did not
immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mexico had an outage at the
Salina Cruz refinery in late June after tremors from an earthquake caused a fire
that led to the brief shuttering of the installation.
The country has
resisted deep output cuts in the wake of a plunge in global oil demand due to
the coronavirus pandemic. Mexico agreed at OPEC+ meetings earlier this year to
cut 100,000 barrels per day of the 1.75 million bpd it pumps for a two-month
period, far less than the 25% reduction from other members.
“Without the
production cuts, they have extra to sell. Remember, they only cut 100,000 bpd
for May and June. Now they can make as much as they want,” one trader who
purchases crude from Mexico said.
Demand to book Aframax tankers from the
East Coast of Mexico to the US Gulf remains busy, shipbrokers said, with
companies including commodities merchant Vitol looking to book cargoes loading
in mid-July.
Houston Refining, CNR and Marathon have provisionally
chartered Aframax vessels this week to load Mexican crude next week, data
showed. Freight rates for Aframax vessels are lower, helping to open up the
arbitrage, one shipbroker said.
As MRC reported
previously, Royal Dutch Shell Plc plans to idle a sulfur recovery unit (SRU)
at the joint-venture Deer Park, Texas, refinery in 2021, said Shell spokesman
Curtis Smith in July 2020. Currently, the refinery is operating at about 75% of
its 318,000 barrel-per-day capacity because of reduced demand due to the
COVID-19 pandemic.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing
polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's DataScope report,
PE imports to Russia dropped in January-June 2020 by 7% year on year to 328,000
tonnes. High density polyethylene (HDPE) accounted for the main decrease in
imports. At the same time, PP imports into Russia rose in the first six months
of 2020 by 21% year on year to 105,300 tonnes. Propylene homopolymer
(homopolymer PP) accounted for the main increase in imports. |
