MOSCOW (MRC) -- Refineries in Texas continued to operate as usual, although rains, floods and power outages hit Texas and Louisiana on Tuesday, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.
Tropical Storm Nicholas moved slowly toward the Houston metropolitan area after weakening from a hurricane. Nicholas was about 15 miles (24 km) southwest of Houston, Texas by 7 a.m. Central Time (1200 GMT), heading northeast with maximum sustained winds of 60 mph (95 kph), the National Hurricane Center said in a bulletin, after it hit the Texas coast hours earlier.
Although Hurricane Ida knocked off significant amount of refining capacity in the Gulf Coast earlier this month, Texas refineries remained operating as of early Tuesday. Motiva Enterprises' 607,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) Port Arthur, Texas refinery - the largest in the United States - was operating normally as Nicholas was passing over the area on Tuesday morning, said sources familiar with plant operations.
Royal Dutch Shell Plc's 302,800 bpd joint-venture Deer Park, Texas refinery was also operating normally on Tuesday morning after the passage of Nicholas, said sources familiar with plant operations. Nicholas caused widespread power outages as it crossed over the Houston metropolitan area late Monday night and early Tuesday morning.
About 485,000 customers were without power in Texas on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Texas energy company CenterPoint Energy Inc said on Tuesday that about 400,000 homes and businesses in its Houston-area service territory were without power.
More than 40% of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico's oil and gas output remained offline on Monday, two weeks after Hurricane Ida slammed into the Louisiana coast, according to offshore regulator Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE).
Damages to an offshore hub that pumps oil and gas from three major oilfields for processing onshore and power outages at onshore processing plants are responsible for the production losses. All four liquefied natural gas (LNG) export plants operating along the Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, remained in service early Tuesday, according to pipeline feedgas data from Refinitiv.
As per MRC, US petroleum consumption recovered to pre-pandemic levels, but there has been a marked shift from consumer-facing sectors towards industry and freight transportation, mirroring the uneven economic recovery. The total volume of petroleum products supplied to domestic customers climbed to 20.1 million barrels per day (bpd) in May, according to the Energy Information Administration. Volumes were down by less than 300,000 bpd (1.4%) from the same month in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, and were actually 200,000 bpd (1.1%) above the pre-pandemic five-year average for 2015-2019.
As MRC informed earlier, recyclers in Southeast Asia were heard operating with low capacity utilisation in the film grade high density polyethylene (HDPE) market due to COVID-19-led lockdown measures. Market sources also said persistent bottlenecks at ports in Asia and some maintenance-related plant closures are likely to hurt the supply of petrochemicals during the week of Aug. 30-Sept. 3.
We remind that Southeast Asian polyethylene terephthalate (PET) recycling companies will continue facing challenges with the availability of raw materials, due to the low collecting and processing rate, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, June estimated HDPE consumption in Russia decreased to 125,900 tonnes from 128,300 tonnes a month earlier. Domestic producers raised their exports, while some producers' output decreased. Russia's overall HDPE shipments to the Russian market totalled 675,670 tonnes in the first six months of 2021, down by 6% year on year. Production increased by 12%, whereas imports fell by 33%.
MRC