Japan's biggest oil refiner, Eneos Holdings Inc. has no plans to buy Russian crude until all problems related to the Ukraine crisis are over and will purchase alternative supplies from the Middle East, reported Reuters with reference to its chairman's statement on Wednesday.
"For now, we intend to get alternatives from existing trading partners such as Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait, but we will continue our efforts to diversify our sources to reduce reliance on the Middle East in the future," Tsutomu Sugimori, chairman of Eneos Holdings, told reporters.
Last month, Sugimori said that Eneos had stopped buying Russian crude in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which Moscow calls a "special operation."
Japan was a buyer of Russian crude in 2021.
The United States said in March it would sell 180 MM barrels of crude from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a rate of 1 MM barrels per day starting in May to help dampen the surge in prices following the Ukraine crisis. This represents the biggest release from the stockpile since it was created in the 1970s.
Members of the International Energy Agency, including Japan, are releasing an additional 60 MM barrels.
"It's a fairly large volume and it will have a certain effect on oil market," said Sugimori, also president of the Petroleum Association of Japan.
As MRC informed previously, earlier this month, TotalEnergies and ENEOS announced a collaboration to jointly conduct a feasibility study to assess the production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) in ENEOS' Negishi refinery in Yokohama city, Japan.
We remind that ENEOS Corporation restarted its naphtha cracker in Kawasaki on 1 February 2021. The company shut this cracker with an annual capacity of 515,000 tons/year of ethylene, 300,000 tons/year of propylene, and 105,000 tons/year of butadiene on 4 December, 2020, for repairment after a technical issue reported at the butadiene separation unit and initially planned to resume operations on 28 December, 2020.
Ethylene and propylene are the main feedstocks for the production of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), respectively.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 2,487,450 tonnes in 2021, up by 13% year on year. Shipments of all grades of ethylene polymers increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market totalled 1,494.280 tonnes, up by 21% year on year. Deliveries of homopolymer PP and PP block copolymers increased, whreas.shipments of PP random copolymers decreased significantly.
Japan's largest refiner JXTG Nippon Oil & Energy was renamed ENEOS Corporation on 25 June, 2020, as part of a wider re-organization of the parent company JXTG Holdings. The move, which also involved renaming the parent company to ENEOS Holdings upon approval at its annual shareholders meeting in June 2020, comes as it strives to be a more comprehensive energy and materials company under its 2040 vision announced in May, 2019. JXTG Holdings was formed as a result of a merger between JX Holdings and TonenGeneral in April 2017. This followed the establishment of JX Holdings as a result of the merger between Nippon Oil and Nippon Mining Holdings in April 2010.
MRC