Page 13 - DMEA Week 09 2020

DMEA
NEWS IN BRIEF
DMEA
Petchems unaffected by
Kuwait port restrictions so
far
Petrochemical exports from Kuwait are continuing as normal days after the country announced restrictions at its ports in response to the coronavirus outbreak.
The restrictions do not cover oil vessels and currently do not affect petrochemical traffic either.
Kuwait is a major Mideast Gulf petrochemical producer and regularly exports polypropylene (PP), polyethylene (PE), mono ethylene glycol (MEG) and aromatics to global markets.
Kuwait PIC and Equate are two key petrochemical producers in the country.
Kuwait announced this week that
its ports will not receive foreign vessels arriving from or departing to China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Thailand and Iraq until further notice.
Iran’spetchemexportupby 5% in 10 months
Spokesman of Iran’s Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union, Seyyed Hamid Hosseini said that Iran’s export of petrochemical products increased 5% in the ten months between March 21 2019 and January 20 2020 as compared to the last year’s corresponding period.
He made the remarks on Sun. in an interview with IRNA and added, “launching new petrochemical units in the country has been cited as one of the main reasons behind export increase of petrochemicals.”
He pointed to the spread of coronavirus in the world and its impact on energy market and added. “outbreak of COVID-19 has left severe effects on oil market and downstream industries from two aspects.”
According to him, Islamic Republic of Iran may be affected severely as a result of outbreak of coronavirus, for, a major part of Iran’s petrochemical products is exported to neighbouring countries.’
Iran’s petrochemicals are mainly exported to two neighboring countries of Turkey and Iraq, he said, adding, “if closure of borders and insecurity continue in this field, it may affect exports market greatly.”
KNPC starts operating naphtha conversion unit, capacityof30,000bpd- KUNA
Kuwait National Petroleum Co (KNPC) on March 5 announced the operation of naphtha conversion unit number 107 in the Mina Al- Ahmadi refinery with a production capacity of 30,000 bpd, state news agency KUNA reported.
PetroRabigh shutdown to last until mid-April
The shutdown of Saudi Arabia’s PetroRabigh petrochemical complex at Rabigh on the Red Sea coast is expected to last until mid-April.
PetroRabigh shut down its 400,000 b/d refinery and petrochemical complex last week with the scheduled maintenance expected to last for 45 days.
The whole petrochemical complex is
shut, affecting production at its 700,000 t/yr polypropylene, 600,000 t/yr linear low-density polyethylene/high-density polyethylene (HDPE), 300,000 t/yr HDPE, 160,000 t/
yr low-density polyethylene, 400,000 t/yr benzene and 1.3mn t/yr PX units.
PetroRabigh is a joint venture between state-owned Saudi Aramco and Japanese trading house Sumitomo.
Socar’s Petkim
petrochemical production
complexannouncesoutput
record
Turkey’s only integrated petrochemical production complex—operated by Petkim,
a subsidiary of Azerbaijan’s national oil company Socar—has said it achieved all-time high output volume in 2019.
Located in Aliaga, Izmir province on the Aegean coast, its production rose 24%
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