On Monday, a spokesman of Taiwan’s Formosa Petrochemical Corp. said that the company has postponed the restart of some refinery units after their maintenance processes were complete. Formosa will also lower its operating capacity this month.
The company’s No.2 of its three crude distillation units (CDU) is now planned to be restarted around May 10 from the initial plan of April 20. The CDU has spent more than a month maintenance shutdown.
The delay was due to the prolonged maintenance of one of its two residue desulphurizers (RDSs), which was originally planned to restart on April 20 but ended up restarted earlier this month.
Other than that, Formosa will restart one of its two residue fluid catalytic crackers (RFCCs) on May 20 and cut the averaged output of its two RFCCs to 60% of capacity from the current 90%.
The company might increase the exports of low-sulfur fuel oil and lower the exports of gasoline as the RFCCs will be lower.
The other two CDUs are currently operating at around 85% of its nameplate capacity rate.
Formosa also said that the company would lower its operating capacity to 440,000 bpd of crude this May, 20% lower than the nameplate processing capacity.
