MOSCOW (MRC) -- Tight supplies of gasoline on the US East Coast are being pressured by refinery outages from Hurricane Ida and the shutdown of a major pipeline that supplies fuel to the Southeast, reported Reuters.
At least nine refineries in Louisiana that account for 13% of US processing capacity on Monday had reduced or halted production, according to the US Department of Energy. Those plants process 2.3 million barrels per day of crude oil into gasoline and other fuels.
US retail gasoline prices could rise between 5 and 15 cents a gallon, estimated Patrick DeHaan, petroleum analyst at fuel tracker GasBuddy.
How much prices increase depends on how quickly refiners and the Colonial Pipeline, the largest fuel pipeline in the United States, can restore operations. Colonial on Sunday halted fuel transport from Houston to Greensboro, North Carolina.
The pipeline company said on Monday, as MRC wrote earlier, it expects to resume full service once the company assesses the impact of Hurricane Ida on operations. It is releasing fuel from storage terminals along the supply route to the Southeast.
Traders are monitoring Ida's effect on East Coast fuel markets. Gasoline stocks are 15% lower than the five-year average. "No amount of barrels of fuel the US can import can fill the gap of the Colonial pipeline," one fuel trader said.
Refiners said they have cut processing in part due to the power utility losses. Utilities across Louisiana and Mississippi cut power to nearly 1.2 million homes and businesses, according to tracking service PowerOutage.com.
As MRC informed previously, six refineries that process 1.92 million barrels per day of oil into gasoline and other petroleum products, either shut or curtailed some production, sources. That includes two Valero Energy plants in Louisiana that combined process 335,000 barrels per day and Phillips 66's 255,000 bpd Alliance, Louisiana, refinery.
Ethylene and propylene are the main feedstocks for the production of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), respectively.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,176,860 tonnes in the first half of 2021, up by 5% year on year. Shipments of exclusively low density polyethylene (LDPE) decreased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 727,160 tonnes in the first six months of 2021, up by 31% year on year. Supply of homopolymer PP and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased. Supply of statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) subsided.
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