MOSCOW (MRC) -- Israel’s largest refining and petrochemicals group, Oil Refineries plans to invest USD1.5 billion to become a cleaner energy company as it faces a government push to shut down more polluting factories, said Hydrocarbpnprocessing.
Israel has proposed shutting a major industrial zone in the coastal city of Haifa that health officials say has been hazardous for years and turning it into an eco-friendly commercial and residential hub. The country would in turn rely more heavily on imports. No final decision has been made.
Haifa-based Oil Refineries, which controls about two-thirds of the domestic fuel market, has opposed the move. But the company's new 10-year plan seems to bring it more in line with the government's vision.
In the plan presented to investors and analysts, Oil Refineries said it will focus on green hydrogen and alternative fuels for transportation, advanced polymers that are recycled and biodegradable, and biopolymers.
At least USD400 million will be invested in "new growth engines" and the rest is for "improving and adapting existing assets, assimilating advanced technologies to create and reducing the carbon footprint," it said. Haifa, Israel’s third largest city and a key seaport, juts off the coastline into the eastern Mediterranean and has grown over the past century into a crossroads for trade and industry.
The city, in turn, has high levels of air pollution and residents suffer from an “excess” of ailments linked to air pollution such as respiratory disease, malignancies and birth defects, according to a recent report by a government panel.
The panel found Haifa has become “stagnant” with low population growth and recommended phasing out within a decade a number of factories, including those belonging to Oil Refineries, that supply much of the country’s fuel products and petrochemicals used in materials like plastics and asphalt.
Also we remind that Israel’s Oil Refineries (ORL) swung to a loss in the fourth quarter, hit by the coronavirus pandemic, and said it had saw signs of recovery so far in 2021. ORL, Israel’s largest refining and petrochemicals group, said it lost USD68 million in the October-December period compared with zero profit a year earlier. Revenue dipped 39% to USD952 million. Its adjusted refining margin was USD4.3 a barrel in the fourth quarter, compared with USD5.2 a year earlier but above Reuters’ quoted Mediterranean Ural Cracking Margin of a negative USD0.1. ORL said that since the start of 2021, refining and polymer margins have risen sharply.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing PE and PP.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,396,960 tonnes in January-July 2021, up by 7% year on year. Shipments of all grades of ethylene polymers increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 841,990 tonnes in the first seven months of 2021, up by 29% year on year. Supply of propylene homopolymers (homopolymer PP) and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased, whereas supply of statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) subsided.
MRC