The Satorp joint venture of state firm Saudi Aramco and French major Total has recently expanded the refinery’s crude distillation capacity by 10% to 440,000 b/d, while also carrying out scheduled maintenance. The return of the refinery to service shows up in the latest Jodi data, which says Saudi refinery runs averaged just over 2.60mn b/d in May, an 18% increase on the 2.2mn b/d reported for April when most of the Satorp work was carried out, but short of the almost 2.83mn b/d record throughput of December 2017 (MEES, 20 July).
And Satorp came back with a bang, taking to Twitter on 9 July to announce the kingdom’s first delivery of gasoline to the US. The cargo of reformulated gasoline blendstock for oxygen blending (RBOB) to the US was described as a “new outlet” for its products. (CONTINUED - 589 WORDS)
