PKN Orlen ends final Russian oil contract without penalties

PKN Orlen has terminated its contract with Russia's Tatneft without paying any penalties, the Polish company's chief executive said on Tuesday, after Moscow halted supplies of oil to Poland, said Reuters.

Supplies via the Druzhba pipeline were stopped in February, just a day after Poland delivered its first Leopard tanks to Ukraine. Poland had pledged to stop using Russian oil by the end of 2022, the same time as PKN's long-term contract with Rosneft expired. The agreement with Tatneft was due to end in 2024.

"These contracts no longer exist. The one with Rosneft expired in January, we did not renew it," Daniel Obajtek told private broadcaster Polsat News. "The second contract with Tatneft ... when the oil stopped flowing, we had an argument to terminate the contract. On this basis, we terminated this contract without penalties." Obajtek said the contract was terminated "a few days ago".

Following the invasion of Ukraine and before the European Union embargoed seaborne supplies from Russia, PKN stopped buying Russian oil and fuels transported by sea.

It said its supply portfolio now included oil from Western Africa, the Mediterranean, the Gulf and the Gulf of Mexico. It also has a supply contract with Saudi Aramco as of 2022.

We remind, PKN ORLEN, finalised a transaction to acquire a part of Poland’s largest plastics manufacturer, Basell Orlen Polyolefins, in which the ORLEN holds an equity interest. The acquisition was approved by the antitrust authorities in Poland and the Netherlands. The business segment, acquired by ORLEN, specialises in the production and sale of low-density polyethylene (LDPE) as well as customer service in the Polish market. It is a polymer commonly used to make consumer and industrial products, found in plastic films, bags, canisters, food packaging, as well as components of electronic devices, such as wires and cables.

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Trinseo, a specialty material solutions provider, and its affiliate companies in Europe announced today a price increase for all polystyrene (PS), ABS and SAN grades, said the company.

Effective April 1, 2023, or as existing contract terms allow, the contract and spot prices for the products listed below will increase as follows:

STYRON™ and STYRON™ X-TECH general purpose polystyrene grades (GPPS) by +50 Euro per metric ton
STYRON™ and STYRON™ A-TECH, STYRON™ C-TECH and STYRON™ X- TECH high impact polystyrene grades (HIPS) by +50 Euro per metric ton
MAGNUM™ ABS resins by +10 Euro per metric ton
TYRIL™ SAN resins by +10 Euro per metric ton

We remind, Trinseo reported a Q4 net loss of $365.3m largely because of a pre-tax, non-cash goodwill impairment charge of USD297m related to its PMMA business and Aristech Surfaces reporting units. The company saw Q4 sales fall by almost 25% compared with the same quarter a year go while costs fell at a slower pace. The following table shows the company's Q4 financial performance. Figures are in millions of dollars.

Trinseo, a specialty material solutions provider, partners with companies to bring ideas to life in an imaginative, smart and sustainably focused manner by combining its premier expertise, forward-looking innovations and best-in-class materials to unlock value for companies and consumers.

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With the ISCC (International Sustainability and Carbon Certification) PLUS certification of its production site in Baytown, Texas (USA), Covestro is significantly expanding the reach of its product portfolio for the circular economy, said the company.

The Baytown site is the company's largest operating facility in North and South America and its third-largest production site worldwide. This most recent achievement is significant, with all of Covestro's major sites now certified by the internationally recognized ISCC PLUS standard. In addition to Baytown, certified sites include Leverkusen, Dormagen, Krefeld-Uerdingen (Germany), Shanghai (China), Changhua (Taiwan), Map Ta Phut (Thailand), Antwerp (Belgium) and Filago (Italy).

"Thanks to this new milestone, Covestro will soon be able to serve even more customers around the world with an easily accessible, more sustainable product portfolio," says Sucheta Govil, Chief Commercial Officer of Covestro. "Customers in North America can now reduce their carbon footprint and Scope 3 emissions with drop-in, mass-balanced materials derived from recycled and bio-attributed products."

We remind, Covestro has successfully started up a new world-scale facility for the production of chlorine in Tarragona, Spain. It is the first world-scale production plant for chlorine based upon the highly innovative and energy efficient ODC (oxygen depolarized cathode) technology invented by Covestro and its partners.

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Chevron Lummus Global LLC (CLG) announced a recent contract award from Petroleo Brasileiro S.A. (Petrobras) for a new 12,580 BPD hydroisodewaxing (HIDW) unit at the GasLub Hub, a lubricant plant in Itaborai, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil. Chevron Lummus Global's scope includes the technology license, basic design engineering, and research unit testing services, said the company.

Employing CLG's ISODEWAXING and ISOFINISHING technologies, the unit will produce a wide viscosity range of premium API Group II/ II+ lubricating base oil grades for the first time in Brazil and South America. The addition of this unit is expected to bring significant benefits to the region by minimizing existing dependence on imported base oils, which is part of Petrobras' strategy to produce higher value-added and quality products to better serve the market.

Decades of dedicated research and development have made Chevron Lummus Global the most trusted technology provider for premium base oils. Since Chevron's invention of ISODEWAXING technology in 1993, CLG lube base oil technologies have provided operators worldwide with enhanced performance, profitability and optimum utilization of existing assets.

We remind, Chevron Corp. posted a record USD36.5 bn profit for 2022 that was more than double year-earlier earnings but fell shy of Wall Street estimates, undercut by an asset writedowns and a retreat in oil and gas prices. The second largest U.S. oil producer's adjusted net profit for 2022 beat by about USD10 billion its previous record set in 2011. But USD1.1 B in writedowns in its international oil and gas operations in the fourth quarter left earnings short of forecasts for adjusted net profit of USD37.2 B.

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US energy and chemical engineer KBR has won a contract to provide its K-GreeN technology to a planned green ammonia project in the US, said the company.

The project is planned by a company called Avina Clean Hydrogen. KBR will provide the process technology licence and engineering design for the grassroots project to produce 2,200 tonnes/day of green ammonia.

KBR’s design for Avina encompasses an integrated green ammonia solution from electrolysis to ammonia synthesis, it said. It did not comment on project costs or timelines for construction and start-up of production.

The contract award comes after Avina announced long-term offtake agreements in December 2022 for 100% of the output from the first phase of a green ammonia plant under development on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Avina could not be reached for additional comment on Tuesday. The company is described as a developer of clean hydrogen plants, with 1.5GW of clean hydrogen plants planned or under development.

We remind, KBR has launched a new ethylene and propylene process technology, utilising 100% hydrogen-fuelled burners, “for zero emissions from the ethylene cracking furnaces,” said the US energy and chemicals engineer company. The new SCOREKlean technology would play a major role to decarbonise the petrochemical industry, given that furnaces are the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the industry, KBR said.

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