MOSCOW (MRC) -- A fire that broke out Oct. 11 at a gasoline tank at the Zahrani oil installations in southern Lebanon has been contained, the prime minister's media office said on Twitter, days after the country plunged into darkness due to a lack of fuel for power plants, reported S&P Global.
The cause of the fire at the gasoline tank, which belongs to the Lebanese army, will be investigated, according to the Twitter post quoting energy minister Walid Fayyad.
The fire comes a few days after Lebanon's main power plants in Zahrani and Deir Ammar in the north ran out of fuel as the cash-strapped government struggles to buy feedstock for its facilities.
Iraq agreed this year to sell Lebanon 1 million mt/year of heavy fuel oil in return for goods and services, which will help OPEC's second-biggest producer reduce a surplus of the commodity. Because Iraq's fuel oil doesn't meet specifications of its power plants, Lebanon will resell the Iraqi fuel and use the proceeds to buy spot cargoes of fuel that is compatible with its facilities, Lebanon's former energy and water minister Raymond Ghajar said July 24.
One million mt/year of fuel would meet around a third of Lebanon's needs, he said at the time.
Lebanon is suffering from severe power outages due to the financial crisis gripping the country, which relies on imported oil products for electricity generation.
We remind that as MRC wrote before, Borealis has declared a force majeure (FM) at its steam cracker in Stenungsund, Sweden after a fire. The FM at the Swedish cracker with the capacity of 625,000 mtyear of ethylene was declared on 14 September, 2021, and the cracker was shut on 11 September due to a malfunction and the fire. A Borealis spokesperson said that the duration of the force majeure was not yet clear.
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 1,396,960 tonnes in January-July 2021, up by 7% year on year. Shipments of all grades of ethylene polymers increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 841,990 tonnes in the first seven months of 2021, up by 29% year on year. Supply of propylene homopolymers (homopolymer PP) and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased, whereas supply of statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) subsided.
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