Tosco Refinery Outage May Strain Petrochemicals

30 April 2001 00:00  [Source: ICB Americas]

A fire on April 23 knocked out part of Tosco Corp.'s Los Angeles area refinery (LAR) system. The system has two plants. A unit in Carson, Calif., processes crude oil and another at Wilmington upgrades that feedstock into finished gasoline and other products. The company has shut down the coker processing unit at Carson and reduced the throughputs of the site's other processing units. However, the Wilmington site is operating normally and has enough feedstock to continue producing gasoline and distillates at normal levels. Tosco's outage comes a week after an explosion brought down Conoco's refinery in Humberside, UK. Analysts are forecasting a tight summer gasoline season and warn that shortages could weaken supplies of petrochemicals used in gasoline or derived from its manufacture. The markets for methanol and MTBE are already firm, and toluene and xylenes have been tightening for the last month and a half. Refinery-grade propylene is also projected to become scarcer next summer.

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