REFINERY NEWS ROUNDUP: Demand for oil products in Europe increases

Demand for oil products in Italy in October rose 4.1%, or 193,000 mt, year on year to 4.9 million mt, according a statement released by industry group Unione Energie per la Mobilita.

However, compared with pre-pandemic October 2019, demand was down 9.4%, or 506,000 mt, the data showed. Sluggish demand for jet fuel dragged down overall oil product demand, with volumes down 45%, or 197,000 mt, compared with October 2019.

Italian demand for refined oil products in the first 10 months of the year gained 8.5%, or 3.54 million mt, to 45.4 million mt, according to Unem. That volume was still down 9.9% compared with the same period of 2019, the group said.

In Spain, the volume of vehicle fuels supplied by the country's national fuel distributor Exolum to the Spanish market in November rose 31% year on year to 3.2 million cu m (2.6 million mt), driven by rising diesel volumes, according to Exolum data published Dec. 6.

November volumes were roughly flat compared with October and September, while the shortfall compared with pre-pandemic November 2019 narrowed to just 4% -- the smallest gap since restrictions started in March 2020.

Despite improved sentiment, closures remain in focus.

** Shell plans to end crude processing at the Wesseling site within the Rhineland refining complex in 2025 as the facilities are repurposed for non-fossil fuel feedstocks and renewable hydrogen production. Shell outlined plans for the facility to take a variety of new biogenic and waste feedstocks, underlining that no final investment decision had yet been taken, and crude processing would still take place at the adjoining Godorf site. The Wesseling portion of the Rhineland refinery accounts for half the overall refining capacity, or 8 million mt/year.

** Petroineos's Grangemouth refinery in Scotland has seen its capacity reduced by 30% to around 150,000 b/d after the closures of a crude distillation unit and the fluid catalytic cracker.

** The Livorno refinery in northwest Italy will stop refining crude and suspend all related activities by the end of 2022. The production of lubricants and ancillary activities will continue for the foreseeable future. In January, Eni said it was evaluating the conversion of Livorno into a biorefinery.

** ExxonMobil permanently shut its Slagen refinery in Norway in June to convert the site into a fuel import terminal.

** Gunvor's Rotterdam refinery shuttered its two crude processing units, one in 2019 and the other in 2020, and is developing new processes around hydrogen and the coprocessing of vegetable oil. Gunvor has also agreed to partner with petrochemical group Dow to purify pyrolysis oil feedstocks derived from plastic waste, using an existing unit at its refinery site in Rotterdam.

** Gunvor's refinery in Antwerp is being mothballed, with terminal activities continuing at the site. Future development opportunities are being assessed.

** TotalEnergies said it would convert the Grandpuits refinery into a biofuel and plastics recycling complex, ending crude refining at the site in early 2021.

** Portugal's Galp said in April the last units at its Porto refinery should be stopped at the end of the month and decommissioning will then start, to be followed by decontamination. The company had said it would discontinue refining operations at the Porto refinery from 2021 and concentrate its core refining activities and future developments at the larger Sines refinery. The site at Porto will remain a logistics hub, with the company assessing other uses.

** Finland's Neste said it had discontinued refining operations at its smaller Naantali refinery at the end of March 2021. With Naantali shut down, the company will focus the site on terminal and harbor operations.

In other news, Israel's Bazan reported 81% utilization in the first nine months of the year, unchanged from a year ago, but its Q3 utilization rose to 86% compared with 73% in the year-ago quarter. Its January-September utilization was affected by the "malfunction that occurred in the continuous catalytic reformer facility." The CCR was halted in early May following a breakdown. The repairs took several weeks, it said. Had this outage not occurred, it would have had 83% utilization in January-September, it said.

The refinery processed 6.713 million mt of feedstock in over January-September, including crude and heavy vacuum diesel, compared with 6.641 million mt in 2020.

In the third quarter alone, throughput was at 2.424 million mt, up from 2.111 million mt.

During the quarter, it estimated that utilization was hit by disrupted feedstock deliveries via pipeline for a period of eight days. Without the disruption its Q3 utilization could have reached 90%.

Meanwhile, there was a fire at BP's Rotterdam refinery Nov. 19, with firefighters called to the site, according to local reports and market sources. The scale of the incident was not certain but, according to some sources, the impact was not substantial.

Separately, members of the UK Unite union accepted a "new deal which covers the issues of pay, bonuses and pensions" at the Stanlow refinery and have ended the strike threat, the union said Nov. 30.

UK's Unite labor union said in September that its members had "overwhelmingly" voted for an industrial action at Stanlow in pay and pensions dispute but further talks were scheduled with Essar.

The STAR refinery in Turkey, owned by Azerbaijan's state oil company Socar, is mostly refining crudes from Kazakhstan, Russia and Norway, Azerbaijan's Azernews news portal Dec. 2 quoted Anar Mammadov, head of the Socar Turkey Refinery and Petrochemicals Business Unit as saying. Mammadov added that the refinery also processed crudes from Tunisia, Morocco and "the Mediterranean countries" and that since it was commissioned in 2018, STAR had tested crudes from 28 different countries.

New and ongoing maintenance

Future maintenance

Near-term maintenance

New and revised entries

** Some units at the Bilbao refinery could be offline for several days following a power cut at 5 am local time (0400 GMT.) on Dec. 7, operator Petronor said. The power outage was due to a cut in supply from Iberdrola, Petronor said, without adding details. The refinery was halted after the outage. The operator said it had put all units on safe mode, resulting in flaring from the site. The refinery was working on re-establishing its power supply to normalize the situation and is restarting some units to see if they have been impacted, it said. It did not say which units were affected.

** The lubricant unit at Italy's Livorno refinery involved in a fire Nov. 30 is offline for maintenance work, Italian company Eni, which owns the plant, said in a statement Dec. 1. Eni said the fire was put out in less than an hour and that no one was injured in the incident. The fire, which started at around 2 pm local time, followed an explosion at the lubricants distillation unit, where maintenance was taking place.

** Works are planned at the hydrocracker at the Zeeland refinery in Flushing, in the Netherlands, in early December, according to sources. The works are due to last for around a week.

** France's Donges refinery is undergoing major maintenance during which it is also building a new desulfurization unit, it said Dec. 2. The refinery started a major maintenance in late November which is due to last until its restart in 2022. TotalEnergies halted operations at Donges on Nov. 30, 2020 due to weak margins. The plant is expected back around March 2022.

** Lukoil's Neftochim refinery in Burgas, Bulgaria is expected back after works around mid-December, according to market sources. Separately, its Petrotel plant in Ploiesti Romania, is back online, said sources.

** Sweden's Gothenburg refinery has completed its maintenance, the company said Nov. 22. It has been carrying out works since October. The refinery has been planning a turnaround in the fourth quarter of 2021.

** Spain's Cartagena refinery has concluded a full turnaround of its conversion and hydrotreatment units including the coker, Europe's largest, the company said Nov. 30. The work started the weekend of Oct. 2. During the halt, Repsol said it would carry out energy efficiency projects to cut CO2 emission by 68,000 mt/year. These include a new compressor in one of the flaring stacks, a new pre-heating unit in the topping unit's furnace and a new tower in that same location.

** Italy's Sannazzaro de Burgondi refinery, which was taken partially offline for large-scale maintenance works in July this year, will remain offline for the whole of next year, a source close to the refinery told S&P Global Platts. Earlier this year union sources said maintenance was being carried out on the plant's slurry technology (EST) unit, which was taken offline following a fire in 2016, as well as on the refinery's hydrocracking unit, the visbreaking plant and the gas depuration unit, among others. Eni's EST plant had originally been scheduled to restart last year but was kept offline amid the nationwide slump in demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Existing entries

** Croatia's Rijeka refinery started a planned temporary shutdown Oct. 28 for a catalyst replacement and will use the time for works on other units, while product deliveries to the market will be ensured during the shutdown.

** Galp will carry out a maintenance on the hydrocracker at Sines starting from the last week of October. The crude distillation unit at the refinery, halted around Oct. 11 due to an unplanned outage at one of its furnaces, has been operating below normal rates as the furnace has been halted for repairs. The company expects the work to be concluded this quarter, and the refinery operating fully by year-end.

** Maintenance continued at MOL's Danube refinery in the first part of the fourth quarter, following smaller works throughout the second and third quarters, the company said in its third-quarter earnings presentation Nov. 5. MOL said earlier it was executing a more intense maintenance schedule this year, after planned works were postponed in 2020 to control costs.

** Turkish refiner Tupras said that the periodic maintenance of the vacuum unit and lube complex at its Izmir refinery, both of which were scheduled to take six weeks during Q4, had been postponed to 2022. The revamp of the FCC unit at its 227,000 b/d Izmit refinery which started in Q1, was ongoing.

** The Canary Islands' only refinery on Tenerife will be permanently closed in the long term. There has been no production since 2014. Cepsa will install some logistics and storage facilities at the site, amid a wider regeneration project.

Future

Existing entries

** OMV is planning a turnaround at its Burghausen refinery in Germany during the third quarter of 2022. The entire refinery will be at a standstill, including the butadiene plant.

** Israel's Bazan has delayed scheduled maintenance of the FCC at Haifa from Q2 2021 to the first half of 2022 when there will be also maintenance at all the Carmel Olefin facilities. Bazan will carry out maintenance of the FCC alongside maintenance at all the Carmel Olefin facilities in the first quarter of 2022.

** Gunvor Group said that its Ingolstadt refinery in Germany will undertake projects focused on heating systems and exchangers "to continue improving its energy efficiency and reduce its emissions." A planned turnaround in 2023 will allow additional reductions, by carrying out projects on the FCC.

** Poland's second-largest refiner Grupa Lotos will carry the second part of the maintenance at its Gdansk refinery in the spring of 2022.

** Czech Unipetrol said that following the turnaround at its Litvinov plant in Q2'20 the refinery has prepared production for a new four-year cycle. Thus, the next turnaround is due in 2024.

** Two months of maintenance at the Sarpom refinery in Trecate, Italy, originally scheduled for October 2019 have been pushed back to 2021. Details on which units at the refinery will be upgraded as part of the maintenance -- of the kind needed every 3-4 years -- had yet to emerge.

** The Holborn refinery near Hamburg, northern Germany, plans its next turnaround in 2023. Its previous maintenance was in the autumn of 2018. The refinery carries out major works every five years.

** Romania's Petrobrazi will undergo its next big turnaround in 2022.

** With its 2020 maintenance, Romania's Petromidia and the petrochemical division "will align with the new operating strategy, with a general turnaround scheduled for four years and technological shutdowns scheduled for two years," the company said.

** Total's Feyzin is considering mothballing a visbreaker unit around 2021 as demand for heavy fuel is gradually declining and the unit works on average no more than three days a month.