Page 5 - MEOG Week 38

MEOG CommentAry MEOG
Idemitsu Kosan and Cosmo Energy had not been informed of any changes, all three had been told to anticipate delays on October shipments of several days.
Reuters quoted a Chinese official as saying last week that Aramco had informed PetroChina that some light crude loadings for October would be delayed by around 10 days as a result of the outage, while some light september ship- ments would be replaced with heavy crude.
meanwhile, Reuters quoted sources on sep- tember 23 as saying that sinopec’s trading arm Unipec would lift Arab Heavy crude instead of Arab Light and Arab Extra Light this month.
The sources added that India Oil Corp. (IOC) would be loading Arab Heavy instead of mostly Arab Extra Light on the VLCC Kalamos vessel, while two south Korean refiners have agreed to substitute medium and heavy grades in for Arab Light and Extra Light for september and October.
Despite Aramco’s assurances, the delays appear to be continuing, with one Japanese refin- ing source telling Reuters that VLCC tango was still awaiting its Banoco Arab medium crude load. He said that Aramco had given notice of a delay “but every day it’s revised. I’m afraid the situation is more serious than we assumed but still information is limited.”
All of this suggests that bringing Abqaiq back into full operation is likely to take some time.
The facility is critical for processing the Arab Light and Arab Extra Light processed at the Gha- war, Khurais and shaybah fields. For at least the last year, Ghawar has been running at around 3.7mn bpd, down from previous industry esti- mates of 5mn bpd+, while Khurais has an Arab Light capacity of 1.2mn bpd from a total output of 1.45mn bpd and shaybah produces 1mn bpd of Arab Extra Light.
All eyes will continue to focus on repairs at Abqaiq, and with customised equipment thought to be required to resume full operations, these will take some time.™
Saudi Arabian oilfields. Map source: Aramco
Week 38 24•September•2019 w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m
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