REFINERY NEWS ROUNDUP: Motor fuel demand rises in Europe

The volume of vehicle fuels supplied from storage facilities to the Spanish retail market in December increased 16% year on year to 3.3 million cu m (2.8 million mt), taking full-year 2021 volumes to a 13% increase, data published by national fuel distributor Exolum showed. December saw the second-highest monthly volume since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, just behind the July figure.
Some turnarounds are starting in Europe, with Italy’s Falconara refinery, although Galp has brought back the CDU at Portugal’s Sines while France’s Donges is on track for a Q1 restart after lengthy economic shutdown.

Meanwhile, closures and capacity reductions announced or carried out over the past two years remained 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’ 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 2021 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, after ending crude refining at the site in early 2021.

** Portugal’s Galp said in April 2021 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.

Meanwhile, PKN Orlen, Poland’s largest refiner, said Jan. 12 it had agreed preliminary deals with Saudi Aramco and Hungary’s MOL to fulfill European Commission conditions to go ahead with its planned takeover of the country’s number two refiner, Grupa Lotos. PKN said it had agreed to sell a 30% stake in Lotos’ Gdansk-based refinery to Saudi Aramco for Zloty 1.15 billion ($290 million).

In other news, Russia’s second-largest crude producer Lukoil plans to boost efficiency at its European refineries rather than sell off assets, the company’s vice president Leonid Fedun said Dec. 17. “There is one task — to increase efficiency, to find those economic niches that will allow these plants to continue to work at a profit,” he said. Fedun added that the company did not currently plan to sell any of its refineries in Europe. Lukoil has three refineries in Europe — in Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria — and has a 45% interest in a plant in the Netherlands.

Separately, Aramco Trading Company will supply 110,000 b/d of crude to Denmark’s Kalundborg Refinery, following the signing of an agreement with Klesch Group. Klesch entered into agreement for the purchase of Equinor’s Kalundborg refinery in June last year and the deal took effect from Jan. 1, 2022. It said in early January that it had rebranded the plant as Kalundborg Refinery. The acquisition included the refinery, a terminal in the northwest of Zealand, the Hedehusene terminal near Copenhagen and other infrastructure assets.

Near-term maintenance
New and revised entries
** API’s refinery in the Italian coastal town of Falconara Marittima was taken offline in early January as part of a general maintenance and upgrade cycle, sources close to the refinery said. The turnaround involves work on furnaces, columns and change of catalysts.

** The FCC unit at Germany’s Mineraloelraffinerie Oberrhein (Miro) refinery is offline due to a technical glitch, according to trading sources Jan. 7. The unit was expected to resume operations around the end of January.

** The whole of Spain’s Bilbao refinery was back around mid December. The refinery went offline Dec. 7 following a power outage. The power outage was due to a cut in supply from Iberdrola, Petronor said, adding that some units at the refinery could be offline for several days. The process of restoring normal operations is underway and the production of some units has been restored, Petronor also said Dec. 10.

** The hydrocracker at the Dutch Zeeland refinery in Flushing was back around Dec. 20, according to sources. The works started in early December.

** Croatia’s Rijeka is carrying out maintenance, including changing catalysts and modification of the hydrodesulfurization reactor at the hydrocracker. The works started Oct. 28.

** The crude distillation unit at Portugal’s Sines, which was halted around Oct. 11 due to an unplanned outage at one of its furnaces, had been back at full operation since mid-December and was running normally, the company said Jan. 12. The unit was kept operating at reduced rates as repairs were carried out on the furnace, with the company having targeted the end of 2021 for a complete return. The company estimated crude throughput in the fourth quarter might be 30% lower than Q3, or around 15 million mt. Galp also carried out maintenance on the hydrocracker at Sines starting from the last week of October for about two weeks.

Existing entries
** 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.

** 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.

** 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.

** 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. 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 as demand for heavy fuel is gradually declining and the unit works on average no more than three days a month.
Source: Platts