MOSCOW (MRC) -- Australia’s Ampol Ltd will consider reopening its Lytton refinery at the end of August, when it expects to complete four months of maintenance work, reported Reuters with reference to its new boss.
Ampol brought forward the refinery turnaround to May as refining margins crashed and extended the outage from two months to four months to the end of August to allow for social distancing of workers at the site.
“We’ll consider at that time what the overall economics equation looks like for the refinery and we’ll make a decision on that basis,” Chief Executive Matt Halliday, who was appointed on Monday after taking the role on an interim basis in March, told Reuters.
As MRC wrote before, Takeover target Caltex Australia Ltd said in early April that it would bring forward and extend the planned shutdown of its sole oil refinery Lytton refinery to ward off the expected hit to refining amid the pressures on demand from the coronavirus pandemic. The company said that operations at the refinery will restart once margin conditions recover.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 721,290 tonnes in the first four month of 2020, up by 4% year on year. Low density polyethylene (LDPE) and linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) shipments grew partially because of the increased capacity utilisation at ZapSibNeftekhim. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market totalled 347,440 tonnes in January-April 2020 (calculated by the formula production minus export plus import). Supply exclusively of PP random copolymer increased.
MRC