MOSCOW (MRC) -- Royal Dutch Shell PLC has announced it plans to sell its only oil refinery in Australia, as the local industry struggles to compete with low-cost operators in Asia, reported The Wall Street Journal.
The number of refineries in Australia has dwindled in recent years as vast new processing facilities have sprung up in India, Singapore and elsewhere in the region.
The Anglo-Dutch oil company said Thursday it may convert its refinery in Geelong, producing up to 120,000 barrels of crude oil a day, to a fuel import terminal if it can't find a buyer. The plant, near the country's second-most populous city, Melbourne, currently supplies about half of Victoria state's fuel.
Shell has hired Bank of America Merrill Lynch to assist with the sale process, which it expects to complete by the end of next year.
Last year, the company converted a refinery in the commercial capital, Sydney, to an import terminal. Caltex Australia Ltd., half-owned by Chevron Corp., plans to make a similar conversion to its Sydney refinery next year.
Among the handful of remaining refineries in Australia, Caltex has another plant in Brisbane, BP PLC owns refineries in Perth and Brisbane, and ExxonMobil Corp has a refinery in Melbourne.
We remind that, as MRC informed previously, in November, 2012, Shell announced that it wouldl upgrade its petrochemical plant in Singapore to meet rising demand for ethylene in Asia. The upgrade will increase the plant's capacity to produce olefins and aromatics industrial chemicals used to make plastic, paint and other products by more than 20%.
Royal Dutch Shell plc is an Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its registered office in London, United Kingdom. It is the biggest company in the world in terms of revenue and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors". Shell is vertically integrated and is active in every area of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, petrochemicals, power generation and trading.
MRC