Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化), the nation’s only publicly traded oil refiner, said it may need one to two weeks to have two-thirds of its Mailiao oil refinery fully operational after a fire damaged a unit three days ago.
Formosa is preparing to restart one of the crude processing units at the plant and may begin feeding oil to it tomorrow, spokesman Lin Keh-yen (林克彥) said.
The Chinese-language Commercial Times reported yesterday the refiner could take a year to restart the residual desulfurization unit damaged by Sunday’s fire.
“I am not that pessimistic,” Lin said by telephone.
The company shut the 540,000-barrel-a-day refinery for safety reasons after on oil leak triggered a fire at the No. 2 residual desulfurization unit, Lin said on Monday.
The blaze was the second accident at the refiner’s Mailiao complex this month. Formosa halted its No. 1 ethylene plant, which has an annual capacity of 700,000 tonnes, on July 7 after a fire.
Yuanta Securities Co (元大證券) analyst Danny Ho (何耀仁) said Formosa may need as little as two months to resume production at the residual processing unit and supporting plants.
The refinery has three crude distillation units, each able to process 180,000 barrels a day. The plants heat crude and separate it into oil products. Residual desulfurization units remove sulfur from residual fuel.
Direct losses” from the fire are estimated at NT$500 million (US$15.6 million), the company said in a statement on Monday.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
Prices of gasoline and diesel products at domestic gas stations are to fall NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively this week, even though international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said yesterday. International crude oil prices continued rising last week, as the US Energy Information Administration reported a larger-than-expected drop in US commercial crude oil inventories, CPC said in a statement. Based on the company’s floating oil price formula, the cost of crude oil rose 2.38 percent last week from a week earlier, it said. News that US President Donald Trump plans a “secondary
RSS