Page 11 - NorthAmOil Week 18 2021
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NorthAmOil PROJECTS & COMPANIES NorthAmOil
HollyFrontier to buy Shell’s
Puget Sound refinery
WASHINGTON HOLLYFRONTIER has agreed to buy Royal to source “advantaged” Canadian and Alaskan
Dutch Shell’s Puget Sound refinery near Ana- North Slope (ANS) crudes, the company said.
cortes, Washington State, for $350mn. This In addition to the purchase price, HollyFron-
comes after Chevron was reported in March to tier will pay around $150-180mn, on current
be the frontrunner for buying the refinery. estimates, for hydrocarbon inventory that will
For HollyFrontier, the acquisition will mark be valued at the deal’s closing. The company said
its entry into the US West Coast market. The it would fund the acquisition with a one-year
company wants to supply it with renewable suspension of its regular quarterly dividend and
diesel from a converted former 52,000 barrel cash on hand.
per day (bpd) refinery in Cheyenne, Wyoming. For Shell, the sale is the latest move to whit-
However, demand for gasoline is also outstrip- tle down its refining portfolio as the super-ma-
ping supply in the region, and the Puget Sound jor adjusts its assets to align more closely with a
refinery can help meet that demand. low-carbon future. The company is prioritising
“We believe that the Puget Sound refinery will sites that have integrated refineries and chemical
complement our existing refining business, with plants on expectations that petrochemical use
sales into premium product markets and advan- will grow in the future.
taged access to Canadian crude,” HollyFrontier’s In September 2020, Shell said it would retain
CEO, Mike Jennings, stated this week. only six refineries, including Norco in Louisi-
The 149,000 bpd Puget Sound plant is a ana and Deer Park in Texas, from 14 previously.
“large, high-quality and complex refinery”, Then, in November it announced that it was
according to HollyFrontier. It is equipped with shutting its Convent refinery in Louisiana as a
catalytic cracking and delayed coking units and result of the demand impact of the coronavirus
is well positioned geographically and logistically (COVID-19) pandemic.
ENERGY TRANSITION
Cheniere delivers carbon-
neutral LNG cargo to Europe
US-EUROPE US LNG producer Cheniere Energy said this “It is great to see more producers offsetting
week that it had supplied a carbon-neutral cargo their GHG emissions to meet the increasing
of LNG to Royal Dutch Shell under the two com- demand for carbon-neutral LNG,” stated Shell
panies’ long-term sales and purchase agreement Energy’s executive vice-president, Steve Hill.
(SPA). The cargo came from Cheniere’s Sabine “Using high quality nature-based offsets to com-
Pass LNG terminal in Louisiana and was delivered pensate for emissions that cannot be avoided or
to an unspecified location in Europe in early April. reduced is an important step as we find more ways
According to Cheniere’s statement, offsets to reduce emissions across the LNG value chain.”
used for the cargo were bought from Shell’s The announcement about the cargo came
global portfolio of nature-based projects. on the same day that Cheniere published its
Cheniere purchased the portion of offsets attrib- results for the first quarter of 2021. The company
utable to estimated carbon dioxide equivalent reported net income of $393mn for the quarter,
(CO2e) emissions associated with activities such up 5% from $375mn in the same quarter of 2020.
as the production and liquefaction of the cargo. The company exported 133 cargoes in the latest
The news comes after Cheniere announced quarter, up from 128 a year ago and 130 in the
earlier this year that it would provide its LNG fourth quarter of 2020.
customers with greenhouse gas (GHG) emis- On the company’s earnings call, Cheniere’s
sions data associated with each cargo produced president and CEO, Jack Fusco, noted that Win-
at its liquefaction facilities, beginning in the first ter Storm Uri, which hit much of the US in Feb-
half of 2022. ruary, had a particularly significant impact on
Shell, for its part, is one of the early movers Texas. Cheniere’s Corpus Christi LNG plant, on
in carbon-neutral LNG, and has also delivered a the Texas Gulf Coast, went offline for a few days
handful of such cargoes itself, primarily to Asian as a result of the storm and the power outages
buyers, since 2019. it caused.
Week 18 06•May•2021 www. NEWSBASE .com P11
