August 14, 2015 – FuelFix from the Houston Chronicle
Refiners running full throttle could lead to a heavier fall maintenance season
By: Rhiannon Meyers
Refineries running full throttle have likely delayed making much-needed repairs, and the strain is starting to show.
As plants operate at record-high capacities to soak up cheap crude and satisfy a growing demand for gasoline, a spate of refinery shutdowns have cropped up across the United States, including a recent shutdown of the BP Whiting plant, the largest refinery in the Midwest.
“It stands to reason that if you run any sophisticated plant harder and faster than normal, you are bound to end up breaking something,” RBN analyst Sandy Fielden wrote in a recent analysis of crude refining trends.
The shutdown of a relatively new crude distillation tower at the BP Whiting plant has been linked to leaking tubes, according to media reports. The outage has caused gasoline prices to spike in the Chicago area and diminished demand for heavy crudes from Canada, Fielden wrote. On Tuesday, Western Canadian Select was selling for $23.22 per barrel, the lowest level in years, according to his analysis.
The problem at the BP plant in Indiana is the latest example of unplanned outages that have plagued the nation’s refineries this year.
An explosion at an Exxon Mobil refinery in Torrance, California in February that injured four workers and knocked operations offline has attracted the most attention, as West Coast gasoline prices to spiked for weeks. But smaller outages have happened, as well. Philadelphia Energy Solutions shut down a catalytic cracking unit that makes gasoline while Marathon Petroleum Corp. shut its refinery in Robinson, Illinois for repairs expected to last two months, according to Reuters reports. Along the Gulf Coast, Shell Deer Park’s jet/diesel unit went down at the end of July, Fielden said.
Read the full article here: http://fuelfix.com/blog/2015/08/14/refiners-running-full-throttle-could-lead-to-a-heavier-fall-maintenance-season/
