China recently announced that construction of their strategic petroleum reserve depots could be completed by 2007-2008. They apparently have not yet started filling them, understandable given the current price of crude oil. The 33 million barrel facility at Zhenzhai in Ningbo is completed; an earlier report claimed it was on track to be completed last August.
The remaining depots are in Aoshan in Zhejiang, Huangdao in Shandong and Dalian in Liaoning. Total capacity would be 101.9 million barrels upon completion.
Not coincidentally, the filling of these tasks is unlikely to begin before 2007, when global refining capacity improves due to refining projects under way being finished. From last year:
Key Asian refinery projects that would help ease a shortage of global capacity this year have run into delays as Indian and Chinese firms facing steep losses on domestic sales see little incentive to rush plans. India’s new Essar Oil refinery has been pushed back again, while a major new crude unit at PetroChina’s Dalian plant will likely run at reduced rates into next year after a late-2005 start, a Reuters survey of expansion plans shows... More modest slippage in other projects has also pushed new capacity toward the end of this year, or from 2006 into 2007, keeping traders on edge over when the global refining industry will be able to restore a supply cushion to tight markets.
No comments:
Post a Comment