MOSCOW (MRC) -- Hengyuan Refining Company Bhd said that a tank storing crude oil had caught fire at its refinery on the Malaysian west coast, reported Reuters.
Preliminary investigations show the fire at the Port Dickson refinery was due to a lightning strike, the company said in a statement.
"The damages sustained from the fire incident are restricted to one crude tank area," the company said.
The fire affected a 10,000-litre capacity oil tank, Malaysian state news agency Bernama reported, citing fire and rescue department officials. Firefighting operations were ongoing, it said.
Hengyuan is a subsidiary of China’s Shandong Hengyuan Petrochemical Co. The refinery at Port Dickson has a capacity of 156,000 barrels per day (bpd).
We remind that, as MRC wrote before, in mid-March 2020, Malaysia's Pengerang Refining and Petrochemical (PRefChem), a 50:50 JV between Petronas and Saudi Aramco, took its naphtha cracker in Johor off-stream after an explostion and fire at the site. The cracker has an annual capacity of 1.2 million tons/year of ethylene and 600,000 tons/year of propylene. Thus, the explosion occurred at PRefChem complex at roughly 10.50 PM on 15 March 2020, which killed five people. The initial report confirmed that the incident took place at the 300,000 barrel per day refinery unit.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 557,060 tonnes in the first three month of 2020, up by 7% year on year. High density polyethylene (HDPE) and linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) shipments rose because of the increased capacity utilisation at ZapSibNeftekhim. Demand for LDPE subsided. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market was 267,630 tonnes in January-March 2020, down 20% year on year. Homopolymer PP and PP block copolymers accounted for the main decrease in imports.
MRC