EIA: Planned refinery outages through year-end not expected to constrain availability of fuels
A recently released report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) finds that planned refinery maintenance is not expected to affect adversely the supply of gasoline, jet fuel, and distillate fuel in the US through the end of 2016. Refinery outages result from both the planned shutdown of refinery units for maintenance and upgrades, and from unplanned shutdowns from a variety of causes such as mechanical failure, bad weather, power failures, fire and flooding. Planned maintenance is typically scheduled when refined petroleum product consumption is relatively low.
The effect of planned refinery outages on product supplies depends on many factors, including the magnitude and duration of the outage, petroleum product demand, the availability of product supplies from other available refinery capacity and imports, and product inventories. Barring unusually high unplanned outages, planned outages that extend beyond schedule, or higher-than-expected demand, the supply of gasoline, jet fuel, and distillate fuel is expected to be adequate in all regions through December 2016.
The report considers planned shutdowns of refinery units as reported by Industrial Info Resources (IIR) and provides EIA's analysis of the implications of outages affecting atmospheric crude distillation units (ACDU), fluidized catalytic cracking units (FCCU), catalytic reforming units (CRU), hydrocracking units (HU), and coking units (CU).
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