Shell Started Gasoline Unit at Dutch Oil Refinery (Update1)
By Nidaa Bakhsh
Feb. 23, 2009 (Bloomberg) — Royal Dutch Shell Plc started a
gasoline-making unit at its Dutch oil refinery, Europes largest,
at the weekend after a two-and-a-half-month closure, a person
familiar with the situation said.
The 50,000 barrel-a-day fluid catalytic cracker at the
Pernis refinery is running normally, the person said, declining
to be identified because the information is confidential. Wim van
de Wiel, a Shell spokesman in The Hague, declined to comment. The
unit was shut by a Dec. 4 fire in a bundle of pipelines.
The units start, originally expected in mid-December and
delayed at least three times, will increase supplies of the motor
fuel ahead of peak demand during the summer. The Pernis refinery
near Rotterdam has the capacity to process about 416,000 barrels
of oil a day.
Gasoline supplies have been curtailed by scheduled and
unplanned plant maintenance. The fuel was trading today $2.28 a
barrel above Brent, Europes benchmark oil, compared with $2.29
on Feb. 20 and $4.73 on Feb. 2, according to data by broker PVM
Oil Associates Ltd. As of Jan. 26, gasoline prices had been lower
than crude oil for most of previous four months.
Exxon Mobil Corp., the worlds largest oil company, shut an
FCC and associated units at its 233,000 barrel-a-day Gravenchon
refinery in France on Feb. 11 for about four weeks.Galp Energia
SGPS SA was forced to shut its entire 202,670 barrel-a-day Sines
site in Portugal because of a Jan. 17 fire. The outage is
expected to last six weeks.
