MOSCOW (MRC) -- Aruba reached an agreement with U.S. based Citgo Petroleum Corp. to end its contract to refurbish and operate the island’s refinery, said Reuters, citing a statement from the island’s prime minister.
The Caribbean nation plans to pursue outside candidates to take over the 209,000 barrel per day refinery, said Prime Minister Evelyn Wever-Croes. The refinery has been idled due to U.S. sanctions on Citgo’s parent Venezuelan state oil firm PDVSA.
Aruba had awarded CITGO a 25-year lease in 2016 to operate the refinery, which had been shut down and converted into a refined products terminal four years earlier by previous owner Valero. The refinery had been expected to restart in 2020.
As it was written earlier, in May 2019, Citgo restrted larger reformer at its US Corpus Christi 52,000 bbl/day refinery with capacity 225,000 benzene; 180,000 toluene tonnes/year.
Benzene is a feedstock for the production of styrene monomer (SM), which, in its turn, is a feedstock for manufacturing polystyrene (PS).
As MRC MRC's ScanPlast report, Russian plants reduced their output of general purpose polystyrene (GPPS) and high impact polystyrene (HIPS) in August 2019 by 19% year on year to 27,280 tonnes. This figure was at 33,5400 tonnes in August 2018. Russia's August GPPS and HIPS production decreased by 15% from July 2019. PS production slightly increased in the Russian market in January-August 2019. Thus, the increase was 1% year on year: 251,690 tonnes versus 248,150 tonnes a year earlier.
MRC