Lyondell refinery FCC outage will impact first-quarter 2020 refining returns
An extended shutdown of the gasoline-producing fluidic catalytic cracker (FCC) at Lyondell Basell Industries’ 263,776 barrel-per-day Houston refinery will impact refining segment returns for the first quarter of this year, Lyondell Chief Executive Bob Patel said.
“Quarter-to-quarter, our refining segment will see some impact from market effects and some internal downtime we’ve had on our FCC,” Patel said in a webcast presentation to Wall Street investors at the J.P. Morgan Industrials Conference.
The market effects Patel referred to include the impact of the Corona virus.
He said the company, which primarily produces chemicals at plants around the world, was free of the virus and its operations in China were resuming following the initial spread of the illness.
The 90,000-bpd FCC was shut by a Feb. 16 fire. Repair of cracks in the unit’s reactor found after the fire is expected to continue through the first week of April, Gulf Coast market sources have told Reuters.
The reactor is the portion of the unit where gasoline is made when fine, powder catalyst interacts with gas oil.
Reporting by Erwin Seba; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Dan Grebler
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