Italy's Saras reports drop in 2023 core profit of refined products ahead of Vitol's takeover

Saras reported a 41% fall in its full-year comparable core earnings due partly to weaker profitability of refined products, as global commodity trader Vitol prepares to take over the Italian oil refiner later this year, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.

Saras, which is controlled by Italy's Moratti family, said its comparable earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) fell to 669.7 million euros (USD730 million) in 2023. The company cited a drop in the "diesel crack", a metric representing the profitability of refined products, to an average of $26.4 per barrel from $37.7 per barrel in 2022, and also a weaker dollar versus the euro.

Saras Group - founded 62 years ago by the father of its current chairman Massimo Moratti - is the owner of the Sarroch plant in Sardinia, which is the single biggest refinery in the Mediterranean with a capacity of 300,000 barrels per day. The Moratti family agreed in February to sell 35% of the company to Vitol at 1.75 euros per share, valuing the entire group 1.7 billion euros.

Upon closing of the deal, the entire stake owned by the Moratti family in Saras will be transferred to Vitol, triggering a mandatory tender offer for the outstanding share capital of the group, with the aim to delist it. Moratti said on Friday that the decision to sell control to Vitol "was a very difficult and emotional choice but taken for the good of the group".

"Vitol... will be able to make Saras grow further, bringing great financial and commercial strength, as well as international professional expertise," Saras chairman added. The Italian government will review the transaction under its so-called "golden power" vetting rules for industries deemed of strategic importance such as banking, energy, telecoms and health.

Rome will seek commitments from Vitol on jobs, investments and continuity of supplies when reviewing the commodity trader's plan to take over the refiner, two sources told Reuters last month. On Friday Saras said its net financial position at the end of 2023 was positive at 167 million euros.

The group will hold a shareholders meeting on April 29 to approve the payment of a dividend equal to 0.15 euros per share.

We remind, circular plastics now account for 13.5% of the content in new plastic products manufactured in Europe, according to industry association Plastics Europe (Brussels). The association today published its biennial “The Circular Economy for Plastics: A European Analysis” report, which noted that the figure means the European plastics sector is more than halfway toward the interim ambition of Plastics Europe’s Plastics Transition roadmap to use 25% of plastics from circular sources in new products by 2030.

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Chemours Company, a global chemistry company with leading market positions in Titanium Technologies, Thermal & Specialized Solutions, and Advanced Performance Materials, announced that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, selected two of its applications for grants totaling USD60 mln, said the company.

These grants will be used by Chemours and its partners for the advancement of technology to support next-generation membranes for proton exchange membrane (PEM) water electrolysis to advance a domestic hydrogen economy supply chain and establish a new Recovery and Recycling Consortium dedicated to enabling the circularity of PEM electrolyzers and fuel cells. These selections validate Chemours’ leadership and expertise as a responsible manufacturer of high-quality, durable ionomers and membranes.

Chemours is the lead recipient on a project entitled “Durable, High-Performance Membranes for Proton Exchange Membrane Water Electrolysis”, where the company will leverage its technical expertise to develop a low-resistance Nafion™ membrane that demonstrates high levels of durability in a PEM electrolyzer stack. The project’s goals include creating products that can be manufactured cost-effectively at scale, a significant challenge the hydrogen industry faces today. Chemours was also named a project partner in H2CIRC, a new consortium dedicated to producing a blueprint for the hydrogen industry to efficiently and sustainably recover and recycle materials and components from fuel cells and electrolyzers.

“Chemours is committed to using the power of its chemistry to advance the clean energy transition and hydrogen economy. Selection by the U.S. Department of Energy for these grants furthers our leading role and builds on the public, private, and academic partnerships whose collaborative efforts support the global adoption of hydrogen as a clean energy source,” said Stefanie Kopchick, Hydrogen Business Venture Leader at Chemours. “Our Nafion™ ion exchange membranes play a critical role in driving the hydrogen economy and helping to create a more sustainable future, and these funds will help to accelerate their further development as well as taking a proactive approach to building an infrastructure supporting circularity of fuel cells and electrolyzers.”

The grants announced by the DOE under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law are part of USd750 million in funding for projects to advance hydrogen technologies and improve manufacturing and recycling capabilities for clean hydrogen systems and components. The funding directly supports the national clean hydrogen strategy outlined in the U.S. National Clean Hydrogen Strategy and Roadmap , which emphasizes cost reduction, manufacturing, supply chains, and domestic jobs.

We remind, Chemours on 29 February announced it placed CEO Mark Newman, CFO Jonathan Lock, and principal accounting officer Camela Wisel on administrative leave, pending completion of an internal review of practices for managing working capital.


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The Belgian government could pass its proposed legislation to tighten the quality of exported fuels as late as June now, missing its previous target of the second half of this month, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.

The royal decree aims to tighten the minimum specifications of fuel exports principally to West Africa, mirroring a similar law imposed in the Netherlands last year to bring a halt to the historically lucrative trade of looser-specificaiton gasoline and diesel out of Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp (ARA).

The loss of Northwest Europe's major blending and storage hub for refined fuels exports to West Africa will leave the region's refiners and traders with a logistical headache over what to do with its structural oversupply of low-quality, cheaper fuel that would not be permitted in local markets.

The legislation is now with the Council of State for an advisory period that can take up to three months, said Mathias Bienstman, spokesperson for the Belgium's environment minister Zakia Khattabi. That is currently the final step before the legislation can be passed.

The ministries involved in preparing the legislation opted only to submit the decree to the Council of State once all other stages had been passed to incorporate all possible elements for the advisory period, Bienstman said regarding the cause of the delay.

The legislation passed the European Union's Technical Regulations Information System (TRIS) - which allows the Commission and other member states to examine potential internal trade barriers on new legislation - on March 11, he added.

If the legislation is passed, there would be an implementation period to give the industry time to adjust. The length of such a period has not been confirmed, but was six months for similar regulation changes, Bienstman said. That means according to the current timeline the quality of fuel exports may have to be lowered from Belgian ports from 2025, if not slightly sooner.

We remind, circular plastics now account for 13.5% of the content in new plastic products manufactured in Europe, according to industry association Plastics Europe (Brussels). The association today published its biennial “The Circular Economy for Plastics: A European Analysis” report, which noted that the figure means the European plastics sector is more than halfway toward the interim ambition of Plastics Europe’s Plastics Transition roadmap to use 25% of plastics from circular sources in new products by 2030.

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New ASEAN Energy and ACTUAL have formed an agreement, leveraging ACTUAL’s AI-driven capital planning technology to develop a comprehensive net-zero emissions strategy for The Pengerang Energy Complex, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.

PEC is set to be one of the world’s largest and most competitive integrated condensate splitter and aromatics facilities. Having signed over USD102B USD of off-take agreements with several blue-chip energy providers, including Equinor, Chevron, PTT, and Mitsui, PEC is anticipated to have higher margins and a materially lower environmental footprint than similar plants.

PEC's outputs are strategically important for industries including textiles, bottling, housing, and pharmaceuticals. PEC is poised to set industry-leading benchmarks, achieving the lowest carbon footprint per ton of Paraxylene (PX) produced by any facility globally, thereby delivering best-in-class performance across many materials. The Agreement between NAE and ACTUAL focuses on building a scientifically and technologically credible transition plan leveraging ACTUAL’s AI-driven capital planning technology.

The plan seeks to improve PEC's environmental performance further to move it towards becoming one of the first net-zero facilities globally.

Decarbonizing complex plants like PEC requires a multi-layered approach. ACTUAL and NAE plan to iteratively investigate several strategies, such as the construction of green renewable power plants for facility operations; blue and green hydrogen production; native green feedstocks for the production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF); carbon capture technologies such as the use of mineralization or algae; alternative sources for industrial heat such as geothermal, among many others.

"ACTUAL’s technology was designed for exactly this kind of important effort — decarbonizing industries critical to our economy and resilience,” said Karthik Balakrishnan, co-founder of ACTUAL. “We are excited to collaborate with NAE to build scientifically valid capital plans that could set PEC on the path towards net zero.”

“With our focus on investing in and operating high-margin, low-carbon facilities in Southeast Asia, engaging with new and innovative ways to improve our sustainability posture is critical,” said William I.Y. Byun, CEO of NAE. “This collaboration is exciting because of the potential to show a clear, articulate pathway towards net zero for one of the premier new facilities in the region.”

We remind, circular plastics now account for 13.5% of the content in new plastic products manufactured in Europe, according to industry association Plastics Europe (Brussels). The association today published its biennial “The Circular Economy for Plastics: A European Analysis” report, which noted that the figure means the European plastics sector is more than halfway toward the interim ambition of Plastics Europe’s Plastics Transition roadmap to use 25% of plastics from circular sources in new products by 2030.

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Dow’s plan to build a new ethylene and derivatives complex at its site in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, Canada, received unusually swift and broad political backing because of its focus on carbon-neutral production, said Chemweek.

“Especially in a polarized political environment, it is remarkable that this project was able to go through all the processes,” Smith said March 20 in Houston at the World Petrochemical Conference (WPC) by S&P Global. “I think the fact that Dow is leading with the emissions question [is] what has depoliticized it. […] It doesn’t matter what political party you're from – if we can have not only great jobs, but also do it in a way that reduces emissions, that is just a value proposition that makes it, I think, politics-proof. And that's something, I think, that we have to consider in this world of uncertainty.”

Jim Fitterling, Dow’s CEO, praised the Canadian authorities for their efforts. “The different parts of the government, whether at the provincial or at the federal level, really worked closely together to help us get things done,” he said. “So we had our permits in place before we ever made a final investment decision. Those are things that we're trying to get right here in the United States, and get that process sped up, but that's not a small task, and I think Canada being very intimately engaged at a lot of different levels with our team actually helped make that a very smooth process.”

Dow announced the “net-zero” carbon dioxide emissions project in October 2021, and made a final investment decision in November 2023. Construction begins this year, with the first phase expected to start in 2027, adding approximately 1.285 million metric tons per year (MMt/y) of ethylene and PE capacity. The second phase will start in 2029, adding a further 600,000 metric tons per year of capacity.

“In our board discussions, it was becoming evident that the world was demanding a reduction in CO2 emissions,” Fitterling said. “We had a discussion at the board meeting without the rest of the management team in the room, and the consensus among us was, we're not going to be able to build another cracker and derivatives complex without it being zero carbon emissions. During COVID, we went away and did a lot of work, and said, how do we take our whole footprint to zero carbon emissions, and we built a master plan.”

Several factors contributed to Dow’s decision to locate the project at its site in Fort Saskatchewan, said Fitterling. The company had for years been considering how to expand the facility, in part because ethane and natural gas prices there are the lowest in North America. Alberta also a petrochemical incentive program offering tax rebates of up to 12% on the capital cost. Since 2020, the region has also had a 240-kilometer pipeline, the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line, capable of gathering, compressing and delivering up to 14.6 million metric tons per year of CO2 for sequestration in depleted oil reservoirs. The opportunity to tie the project in with carbon capture and sequestration was crucial.

”We’re very happy to have a first-mover advantage, and to be doing it in Fort Saskatchewan,” said Fitterling. “I think it will be kind of a case for what we can do and replicate here in the US Gulf Coast once we’ve got it proven and up and running.”

We remind, circular plastics now account for 13.5% of the content in new plastic products manufactured in Europe, according to industry association Plastics Europe (Brussels). The association today published its biennial “The Circular Economy for Plastics: A European Analysis” report, which noted that the figure means the European plastics sector is more than halfway toward the interim ambition of Plastics Europe’s Plastics Transition roadmap to use 25% of plastics from circular sources in new products by 2030.

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