MOSCOW (MRC) -- U.S. Department of Energy has awarded contracts to eight companies for crude oil from a previously announced Strategic Petroleum Reserve sale of up to 20 million barrels, the department said, said Reuters.
Contracts went to Atlantic Trading & Marketing Inc; Chevron USA; ExxonMobil Oil Corpn; Marathon Petroleum Supply and Trading; Motiva Enterprises; Phillips 66 Co; Unipec America Inc; and Valero Marketing and Supply Co, the department said in statement dated Sept. 10 that appeared online on Monday.
The department had announced the call for bids Aug. 23 to comply with recent legislation mandating the sale from the nation's emergency oil reserve. Deliveries of the oil are expected from Oct. 1 to Dec. 15.
The sale comes as oil prices are at a one-week high amid U.S. supply concerns over storm damage from Hurricane Ida and the ongoing impact from COVID-19.
As per MRC, most of the nine Louisiana refineries shut by Hurricane Ida have restarted or were restarting, nearly two weeks after the powerful storm came ashore, a Reuters survey showed. Refiners are coming back faster than oil production, a reverse of past storm recoveries. Just three of the nine refineries were completely idled, accounting for about 7% of Gulf Coast refining, compared to shut-ins of two-thirds of oil output.
As MRC informed earlier, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, one of the largest operators in the Gulf of Mexico, declared force majeure on some oil deliveries due to damage from Hurricane Ida, which has crippled U.S. offshore oil production. More than three-quarters of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico's offshore oil output remained shut following Ida. Crude buyers said the full restart of production remained unclear due to extensive damage to various facilities. The hurricane was one of the most devastating for offshore producers since back-to-back storms in 2005 cut output for months.
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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