Blast at Vynova chemical plant in Belgium causes chemical spill

MOSCOW (MRC) -- A chemical leak occurred after an explosion at the Vynova plant in Belgium, as per BreakingtheNews with reference to local media's Thursday reports.

Gas clouds were seen rising from the chemical facility located in the Belgian province of Limburg after a blast was heard.

There is still no information on the substance of leaked chemicals. However, the authorities have advised the local citizens to remain inside and seal their doors and windows.

Belgian media reports there are no injuries or casualties so far. The investigation is ongoing at the moment.

As MRC wrote before, 17 September 2018, the company declared force-majeure on supply of caustic soda from the petrochemical complex in Tessenderlo, Belgium, because of a production glitch at another plant, located at the same site, which can produce 740,000 tonnes of vynil chloride monomer (VCM) per year. The annual capacity of the caustic soda plant is 302,000 tonnes.
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US East Coast refiners cash in by the trainload on Canadian oil

MOSCOW (MRC) -- US East Coast oil refiners are ramping up rail deliveries of crude from Western Canada, grabbing stranded barrels that full pipelines have driven to a record discount, reported Reuters.

That trend is expected to accelerate, as prices will remain weak, with no new Canadian export pipelines expected until late 2019. Rail volumes from Canada to East Coast refineries averaged 35,000 barrels a day for the 12 months ending in July, up from 16,000 bpd for the prior 12-month period.

Canada is having difficulty building and expanding pipelines due to environmental and aboriginal opposition, prompting a swing back to its crude-by-rail delivery system.

Bottlenecks helped drive the discount of Western Canadian Select heavy crude, the primary grade of oil produced in the province of Alberta, to a record USD43.50 below U.S. West Texas Intermediate oil futures late last week.

Canadian light synthetic crude trades around USD18 below WTI, making both Canadian benchmarks more attractive to US East Coast refiners than US grades of oil or crude imported from Europe or Africa. Brent, the international benchmark, is currently trading at nearly a USD10 premium above US crude.

"Historically, East Coast refiners would be at the mercy of global waterborne Atlantic pricing, but given how North American crude differentials materially weakened, this has been a significant boon," said Michael Tran, commodity strategist at RBC Capital Markets.

With five of the top 10 US refiners of Canadian crude scheduled to go offline for maintenance in the next six months, Canadian prices may remain depressed, Tran said.

If the Canadian differential stays wide and rail capacity grows, traders expect volumes east to return to record levels around 100,000 bpd, last reached in 2014.

Just one East Coast refinery regularly processes the heavy oil that accounts for most Western Canadian production, traders said. Recent rail shipments of heavy crudes have gone to PBF Energy Inc’s 190,000-bpd Delaware City refinery, and light crude to Philadelphia Energy Solutions Inc’s 335,000-bpd complex, sources said.

Phillips 66 took in Canadian heavy crude to its 258,000-bpd New Jersey refinery in April for the first time in a year and a half, and also imported in May and June, the last months for which data is available. PBF, Phillips 66 and PES declined to comment on commercial operations.

Rail volumes from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries are larger than those to the East Coast, but their growth rate is slower. Those volumes averaged 81,000 bpd in the 12 months to July, up 26 percent from the previous 12-month period, EIA data showed.

"There’s existing shippers who have increased their volumes to the east," said Iqbal Gill, head of hydrocarbon supply for BarrelTex. "Gulf Coast shipments have increased as well but not to the degree Eastward movements have."

Canada’s overall crude exports by rail hit a new record at 206,624 bpd in July. This is expected to keep rising, yet shipments may be hindered by competition from other commodities like grains and a shortage of rail cars.

Regulators are fast-tracking the phase-out of older, more puncture-prone cars, while top US railroad BSNF is limiting the use of retrofitted cars on its lines, citing safety concerns.

Those changes together affect roughly 17 percent of the current fleet of crude rail cars in North America, said Matt Murphy, an energy analyst with Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co.

This will limit volumes of Canadian crude to East Coast refineries, say traders.

"Every refinery out there that has access to rail is looking for more unit trains but they’re nowhere to be found," said one East Coast refinery trader, who declined to be named, citing company policy.
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Honeywell launches new industrial cybersecurity services to address customer skills gap

MOSCOW (MRC) – Honeywell has added new cybersecurity consulting services designed to help industrial and critical infrastructure customers identify and eliminate dangerous security weaknesses, as per Hydrocarbonprocessing.

The Honeywell CyberVantage™ Security Consulting Services portfolio now includes Penetration Testing, providing active “white-hat” hackers who exploit customer defenses in order to fix them. It also now offers System Hardening to reduce software vulnerabilities and assist customers in safely complying with global Center for Internet Security (CIS) industry benchmarks.

Delivered by consultants with expertise in both operational technology (OT) and industrial cybersecurity, the services help organizations lower the risk and possible impact of security incidents and improve their industrial cybersecurity maturity levels. Strategically, CyberVantage Security Consulting Services provide capabilities that enable safer connected plants, digital transformation, and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) efforts.

The need for industrial cybersecurity skills is particularly critical as the process industries face a growing worldwide skills gap, with research company Cybersecurity Ventures predicting 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity positions by 2021. As well, fines introduced by government legislation can cost non-compliant customers millions of dollars. Tapping Honeywell’s specialized knowledge of requirements such as industrial control system (ICS) security standard IEC-62443 and a variety of country specific standards can help avoid such penalties while improving cybersecurity preparedness.

The new Penetration Testing and System Hardening offerings expand the Honeywell CyberVantage Security Consulting Services portfolio of more than 30 services that deliver comprehensive cybersecurity expertise to industrial clients, from assessments and audits to remediation. CyberVantage customers have access to hundreds of cybersecurity experts, as well as multiple Industrial Cybersecurity Centers of Excellence located around the world to simulate, validate and accelerate their multi-vendor industrial cybersecurity solutions. The purpose-built, state-of-the-art facilities are staffed by Honeywell cybersecurity experts.

The news of CyberVantage Security Consulting Services was announced at the 2018 Honeywell Users Group EMEA Conference in Madrid, Spain, where hundreds of automation users and industry experts gathered to explore the latest industry trends and technology developments as well as share experiences and transfer knowledge.
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Exxon Mobil eyes multi-billion dollar investment at Singapore refinery

MOSCOW (MRC) -- Exxon Mobil Corp is considering a multi-billion dollar investment at its Singapore refinery, the company’s largest, ahead of new global shipping fuel regulations starting in 2020, reported Reuters with reference to a senior executive.

"We are currently assessing a multi-billion project in our integrated manufacturing facility here in Singapore," Matt Bergeron, vice president of Asia Pacific Fuels Business at Exxon, said at a bunkering conference.

"Should the project proceed, we plan to implement proprietary technologies that will convert lower value by-products into cleaner higher value products including 0.5 percent sulphur fuels that we believe will be the compliant option for the vast majority of the marine sector," Bergeron said.

The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) is introducing new rules on marine fuels from 2020, limiting the sulphur content to 0.5 percent, from 3.5 percent currently, to curb pollution produced by the world’s ships.

The shipping and oil refining industries are scrambling to prepare for the shift and have made large investments to comply with the new standards since they were announced in 2016.

Exxon’s Singapore refinery is the company’s largest, with a capacity of about 592,000 barrels a day. Singapore is also home to the oil giant’s biggest integrated petrochemical complex.

"We have already made significant investments at a number of other refineries around the world in order to increase our production capacity of cleaner fuels with lower sulphur content," Bergeron said.

Exxon in September announced it was planning to spend more than USD650 million to upgrade the UK’s largest oil refinery, Fawley, on England’s south coast.

ExxonMobil is the largest non-government owned company in the energy industry and produces about 3% of the world's oil and about 2% of the world's energy.
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AGC evaluating potential expansion of its Vinythai chlor-alkali business

MOSCOW (MRC) -- AGC has begun evaluating an expansion of production capacity at its chlor-alkali subsidiary, Vinythai, as part of its initiative to expand its chlor-alkali business in Thailand, as per Apic-online.

The project would involve increasing the production capacity of polyvinyl chloride to 860,000 t/y from 300,000 t/y, vinyl chloride monomer to 830,000 t/y from 400,000 t/y and caustic soda to 590,000 t/y from 370,000 t/y. A final decision will be made based on the findings of the environmental and health impact assessments.

AGC, which acquired Vinythai in 2017, is currently undertaking measures toward integrating Vinythai with the nearby AGC Chemicals (Thailand) Co. to increase the synergy of the two companies.

The company has plans to install a pipeline between the two businesses to share chlorine production.

As MRC wrote before, in December 2016, CMC Biologics, a global leader in clinical and commercial manufacturing of monoclonal antibodies, coagulation factors and other therapeutic proteins and AGC Asahi Glass (AGC), a world-leading manufacturer of glass, chemicals and high-tech materials, announced that they had entered into a definitive agreement with CMC Biologics' shareholders including Monitor Clipper Partners, European Equity Partners and Innoven Partenaires, by which AGC will acquire 100% of CMC Biologics' shares.

Asahi Glass Co., Ltd., more commonly known as AGC, is a global glass manufacturing company, headquartered in Tokyo. It is one of the core Mitsubishi companies.
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