MOSCOW (MRC) -- Asia's largest oil and gas firm PetroChina resumed construction of its oil refinery and petrochemical project in southern Chinese province of Guangdong, as the number of new coronavirus cases fell for a second straight day, reported Reuters.
In an attempt to curb the spread of the virus, China had extended Lunar New Year holidays and asked companies to put workers returning from their hometown into a 14-day quarantine.
With workers and machineries gradually in place, the USD10 billion refinery project in Jieyang city is expected to fully restart construction by end-February, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
The project is scheduled to be fully completed by June 2022, with the launch of an oil refining section by end-2021 and chemical section in March 2022.
The new coronavirus has caused 2,004 deaths in China and infected more than 74,000 people, while measures to contain it have paralysed the economy and the supply chains it feeds.
As MRC wrote previously, Sichuan Petrochemical (part of PetroChina) undertook an emergency shutdown at its naphtha cracker in Sichuan province of China on July 11, 2018 owing to a gas leak at its natural gas supply pipeline. Further details on duration of the outage could not be ascertained. Located at Sichuan province of China, the cracker has an ethylene capacity of 800,000 mt/year.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,724,670 tonnes in the first ten months of 2019, up by 7% year on year. Shipments of all PE grades increased. The estimated PP consumption in the Russian market in January-October 2019 totalled 1,066,520 tonnes, up by 7% year on year. Supply of block copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymer) and homopolymer of propylene (homopolymer PP) increased, demand for statistical copolymers (PP random copolymer) decreased.
PetroChina Company Limited, is a Chinese oil and gas company and is the listed arm of state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation, headquartered in Dongcheng District, Beijing. It is China's biggest oil producer.
MRC