TotalEnergies Texas FCC work to continue to late November

A planned overhaul of the gasoline-producing fluidic catalytic cracker at TotalEnergies’ 238,000 bpd Port Arthur, Texas refinery is expected to continue into late November, said people familiar with plant operations to Reuters.

The 76,000-bpd gasoline-producing fluidic catalytic cracker-2 was shut on Aug. 23 for a planned overhaul.

"We do not comment on our operations at the Port Arthur platform," said TotalEnergies spokesperson Marie Maitre on Tuesday.

FCCs use a fine powder catalyst to convert gas oil into gasoline.

We remind, TotalEnergies has reported net income of $6.67bn (€6.33bn) in the third quarter of 2023, a marginal 1% increase compared with $6.62bn in the same period a year ago, said the company. In the July–September quarter of 2023, the French oil and gas company reported $54.41bn in revenue from sales, a 16% decline from $64.92bn in Q3 2022.

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Marathon Petroleum Corp said on Sunday one person was injured and 20 facility workers were evacuated due to a fire at its Martinez refinery in California which firefighters had extinguished, said Hydrocarbnprocessing.

"A fire was reported on a stack at a renewable diesel manufacturing company. The fire has been suppressed but the fire department will remain on scene to watch for spot fires," the company said in a filing with the state regulator early on Sunday.

Marathon Petroleum responders extinguished the fire at the company’s Martinez renewable fuels facility, and one employee was injured and transported to a medical facility, the company told Reuters in an emailed response. Fenceline air monitoring indicated no off-site impact, Marathon said.

Contra Costa Health (CCH) Services issued a public health advisory and said its crew members were "responding to reports of a fire at Martinez Renewable Fuels (Marathon Refinery) that may affect surrounding areas" on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The incident was classified by CCH as a Level 1 Alert, meaning it was an event "lasting longer than 20 minutes or with odors."

We remind, Marathon Petroleum’s third-quarter net income fell 26.7% year on year to $3.28bn as revenues fell at a faster pace than costs and expenses. The refining and marketing margin fell to $26.16/barrel, from $30.21/barrel in Q3 2022. Refining capacity utilisation was 94%, compared with 98% in Q3 2022. The refining throughput was 3.0m bbl/day, unchanged from Q3 2022.

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Fertilizer maker Yara has signed a binding agreement to capture CO2 emissions from its Dutch ammonia plant and transport it to the Norwegian North Sea for storage deep beneath the seabed, said Reuters.

The carbon capture and storage project (CCS) will cut annual emissions of CO2 by 800,000 tonnes over a 15-yr period, the Norwegian company said in a statement.

When operation begins in 2025, it is expected to become the first time that CO2 from one nation is transported across borders for storage by another, Yara said.

The CO2 will be liquefied and shipped by Northern Lights, a company owned by Equinor, TotalEnergies and Shell, from the Sluiskil plant to permanent storage on Norway's continental shelf, 2.6 km (1.6 miles) under the seabed.

"This is a milestone for decarbonizing hard-to-abate industry in Europe and for Yara it's an important step towards decarbonizing our ammonia production, product lines and the food value chain at large," Yara CEO Svein Tore Holsether said.

We remind, Yara and chemicals giant BASF are looking into developing and building a low-carbon blue ammonia production facility in the U.S Gulf coast region. The companies are planning to complete their feasibility study on the production facility by the end of this year, they said. They are looking into the feasibility of a plant with a total capacity of 1.2 to 1.4 million tons per year, they added.

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A U.S. jury has convicted two Texas men of trying to sell Iranian petroleum in violation of sanctions imposed by Washington and of conspiracy to commit money laundering, said Reuters.

Zhenyu Wang and Daniel Ray Lane were found guilty, and each face a maximum penalty of 45 years in prison. The two men had planned to purchase petroleum from Iran, mask its origins, and then sell it to a refinery in China, the U.S. Justice Department said in a statement.

Lane was president of privately held Stack Royalties, a Texas-based company that sells oil and gas mineral rights to investment funds and private equity groups. Lane's attorney, Paul Hetznecker, told Reuters in a statement that the case was based on undercover government agents who offered Lane "millions of dollars in profits" if he took part in the scheme, after initially rebuffing their approaches.

"This is an outrageous example of government overreach," Hetznecker said in a statement. He vowed to appeal the conviction. An attorney for Wang did not respond to a request for comment.

The pair were charged, along with three others, in 2020 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Two co-conspirators have since pleaded guilty, court records showed.

"The Justice Department will not tolerate those who would violate U.S. sanctions and imperil our national security for personal profit," said Matt Olsen, head of the Justice Department's National Security Division, in a statement.

China is the world's only major importer of Iranian oil despite sanctions former U.S. President Donald Trump unilaterally re-imposed on Tehran's petroleum exports in 2018 after withdrawing the United States from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal between Tehran and six world powers. The pair are scheduled to be sentenced on Feb. 29, 2024.

We remind, a planned overhaul of the gasoline-producing fluidic catalytic cracker at TotalEnergies’ 238,000 bpd Port Arthur, Texas refinery is expected to continue into late November. The 76,000-bpd gasoline-producing fluidic catalytic cracker-2 was shut on Aug. 23 for a planned overhaul. FCCs use a fine powder catalyst to convert gas oil into gasoline.

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China's gasoline exports fell 20% in October from a year earlier, data showed on Saturday, as domestic road travel surged during the Golden Week holiday, said Reuters.

Gasoline shipments of 770,000 mt were down from last year's 1 MMt and below September's 1.09 MMt, data from the General Administration of Customs showed.

Domestic road travel received a boost during an extended Golden Week holiday, which ran from the end of September through the first week of October. Trip numbers were up 71.3% from a year earlier and 4.1% higher than in 2019, according to data released by state media outlet Xinhua. Diesel exports remained strong, up 4.4% in October from a year earlier to 1.1 MMt, as a worsening slump in property construction continued to suppress domestic demand.

Exports of diesel, which account for the biggest share of refinery output, eased slightly month-on-month from September's 1.18 MMt. Domestic diesel demand continues to face significant headwinds from China's property slowdown and an uneven recovery in its manufacturing sector. Jet fuel exports stood at 1.53 MMt, up 5.5% from September and up 32% from a year-earlier.

Domestic kerosene demand is benefiting from the domestic travel surge, with domestic flight levels already above pre-COVID levels and expected to step up further. However, international airline capacity in and out of China in October and November this year was around 56% to 57% of the figure in the same months of 2019, before the pandemic halted international travel, according to data from aviation analytics firm OAG.

Fuel provided to international flights is counted as an export in customs statistics. Regional refining margins continued to fall, declining from $6.72/bbl at the start of October to $2.79/bbl at the end of the month. Total refined fuel exports, which includes marine bunker fuel, continued to ease month-on-month in October, customs data previously showed. The data released on Saturday also showed China imported 5.17 MMt of LNG in October, up from a relative low of 4.03 MMt last year.

We remind, GS Caltex Singapore Pte Ltd said on Monday it has sold its first cargo of biofuel-blended marine gasoil to Maersk Oil Trading (MOT) at the world's largest bunker hub Singapore as it seeks to expand into lower carbon fuels.The sale by the Singapore-based trading arm of South Korea's second-largest refiner is part of GS Caltex's plans by to expand its biofuels supply chain overseas. More of such biofuel bunkering trials are taking place at key global maritime hubs this year as the shipping industry tests new and cleaner fuels in a bid to reduce emissions.

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