MOSCOW (MRC) -- Royal Dutch Shell Plc pushed back the restart of its 318,000 bpd joint-venture Deer Park, Texas, refinery to March 13, reported Reuters with reference to sources familiar with plant operations.
Shell spokesman Curtis Smith declined comment.
Shell had planned to restart the 270,000-bpd DU-2 crude distillation unit (CDU), the largest at the refinery, by early this week, the sources said.
Shell is continuing repairs at the refinery to enable it to restart from the Feb. 15 shutdown because of cold weather, the sources said. Repairs could last until April.
The Deer Park refinery is a 50-50 joint venture between Shell and Mexican national oil company Pemex. Shell is the managing partner.
As MRC informed previously, in early November 2020, Royal Dutch Shell announced it was closing its refinery in Convent, Louisiana, the largest such US facility and first on the US Gulf Coast to shut down since the coronavirus pandemic devastated worldwide demand.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 2,220,640 tonnes in 2020, up by 2% year on year. Only shipments of low density polyethylene (LDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) increased. At the same time, polypropylene (PP) shipments to the Russian market reached 1 240,000 tonnes in 2020 (calculated using the formula: production, minus exports, plus imports, excluding producers' inventories as of 1 January, 2020). Supply of exclusively PP random copolymer increased.
Royal Dutch Shell plc is an Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its registered office in London, United Kingdom. It is the biggest company in the world in terms of revenue and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors". Shell is vertically integrated and is active in every area of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, petrochemicals, power generation and trading.
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