MOSCOW (MRC) -- Italian oil and gas company Eni expects to boost gasoline production at Angola’s Luanda refinery to 470,000 tonnes within two years from the current 110,000 tons a year, reported Reuters with reference to a senior company official's statement.
Last year, Eni signed an agreement with Angola’s state-owned oil firm Sonangol to lift production at the 65,000 barrel per day plant, the only refinery in Africa’s second-largest oil producer which imports around 80% of its fuel products.
"The installation of a specific unit, which is called a platformer, (will allow the refinery) to increase production of reformate gasoline," said Andrea Giaccardo, Eni Angola’s managing director, in a country report to an African oil and power conference in Cape Town.
"The current capacity of the refinery is 110,000 tonnes per year and the target, once the platformer is installed, is to reach a production capacity of about 470,000 tonnes per year by 2021," he said.
Milan-based Maire Tecnimont S.p.A. said separately its Kinetics Technology subsidiary was awarded the engineering, procurement and construction contract worth USD200 million.
Eni operates the Luanda refinery under a joint venture with Sonangol.
As MRC informed earlier, Italy’s Versalis (part of Eni) took its cracker in Dunkirk, France offline in early September, 2019, due to a fire which broke out at the company’s petrochemical plant. It is not yet known how long the unit will remain shut. Local media sources also reported that the fire was brought under control with no reported injuries and the company is currently assessing the required repairs. The cracker has a production capacity of 380,000 tons/year of ethylene and 95,000 tons/year of propylene.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polyprolypele (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,255,800 tonnes in the first seven months of 2019, up by 9% year on year. Shipments of all PE grades increased. At the same time, the estimated PP consumption in the Russian market was 796,120 tonnes in January-July 2019, up by 11% year on year. Shipments of PP block copolymer and homopolymer PP increased.
Eni is an Italian multinational oil and gas company headquartered in Rome. It has operations in in 79 countries, and is currently Italy's largest industrial company with a market capitalization of 68 billion euros (USD 90 billion), as of August 14, 2013. The Italian government owns a 30.3% golden share in the company, 3.93% held through the state Treasury and 26.37% held through the Cassa depositi e prestiti. Another 39.40% of the shares are held by BNP Paribas.
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