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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Limetree Bay refinery
in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands, recently began producing
transportation fuel, reported Reuters
with reference to people familiar with the matter, clearing one of the hurdles
that had disrupted a facility restart and jeopardized its crude supply
contract.
Achieving full operation is required for Limetree Bay owners’
EIG Global Energy Partners and Arclight Capital Partners to retain a crude
supply and product offtake contract with BP Plc. Full startup has been delayed a
year and the project has run more than USD1 billion over budget.
BP is
set to load ultra low sulfur diesel from the 210,000-barrel per day plant this
week, according to two sources and vessel tracking data. Plant operations are
“stabilizing,” according to one of the people familiar with the matter, after
two fires in December.
Limetree Bay did not respond to a request for
comment. BP declined to comment on Monday.
Limetree was given an
undisclosed period to cure the plant’s problems after BP warned delays past
mid-January would allow it to exercise a clause in its contract and exit the
agreement to supply crude oil and market the resulting fuels.
The plant
has been making semi-processed fuels including light-end distillate fuel oil and
naphtha since restarting a crude unit in September. But it struggled to bring
units online to make gasoline and diesel. It had been idled since
2012.
The refinery restart suffered repeated setbacks including high
levels of corrosion in pipes and weaker-than-expected demand for IMO
2020-compliant transportation fuels, such as ultra low sulfur diesel, that the
owners have sought to tap.
As MRC wrote before, in
late October 2020, a “technical defect” disrupted production at part
of BP's Gelsenkirchen integrated refinery and petrochemicals complex in
Germany, early last week. The company operates plants in the Horst and Scholven
districts at Gelsenkirchen, with the defect occurring at Horst. BP said
then it was working to resume normal operations as soon as possible. It did
not specify which unit has been affected, with sources suggesting it was the
fluid catalytic cracker, but this was not confirmed by the
company.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing PE and
polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's DataScope report,
PE imports to Russia decreased in January-November 2020 by 17% year on year and
reached 569,900 tonnes. High density polyethylene (HDPE) accounted for the
greatest reduction in imports. At the same time, PP imports into Russia
increased by 21% year on year to about 202,000 tonnes in the first eleven months
of 2020. Propylene homopolymer (homopolymer PP) accounted for the main increase
in imports. |
