MOSCOW (MRC) -- Marathon Petroleum Corp said it would temporarily idle its 26,000-barrel-per-day Gallup, New Mexico, refinery beginning on April 15, amid slumping demand from the coronavirus pandemic, said Reuters.
The company said it intended to maintain regular employee staffing levels with employees assigned to tasks “necessary to support our idle status and eventual return to normal operations."
\\"“At this time, the duration of the idling period is unknown; however, it is our intent to return to normal operations as soon as demand levels justify doing so,” a company representative said in a email.
Refineries around the world have shut units or cut back to minimum processing levels because of a plunge in demand because of the coronavirus. The pandemic has caused the global aviation industry to virtually shut down and kept motorists off the roads.
Overall global fuel demand is expected to drop by 20% to 30% in April and remain weak for months after that.
Gallup will be the second North American refinery to idle amid the coronavirus pandemic. North Atlantic Refining Ltd’s 130,000-bpd Come-by-Chance refinery in Canada said it was pausing production at the end of March.
As MRC wrote previously, a portion of Marathon Petroleum Corp’s 363,000 barrel-per-day Carson refinery in California was shut in late February 2020, following a fire.
We also remind that the gasoline-producing unit at Marathon Petroleum Corp’s 585,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) Galveston Bay Refinery in Texas City, Texas, remained shut for six weeks for repairs in late Juney-early August 2019. The 140,000-bpd gasoline-producing Fluidic Catalytic Cracking Unit 3 (FCCU 3) was shut on June 29 2019 to repair a leak. The refinery’s 65,000 bpd reformer, called Ultraformer 4, was also shut down.
Propylene is the main feedstock for the production of polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, PP shipments to the Russian market were 127,240 tonnes in January 2020, up by 33% year on year. ZapSibNeftekhim's homopolymer PP accounted for the main increase in shipments.
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