zhejiang rongsheng refinery pricelist

China"s private refiner Zhejiang Petroleum & Chemical is set to start trial runs at its second 200,000 b/d crude distillation unit at the 400,000 b/d phase 2 refinery by the end of March, a source with close knowledge about the matter told S&P Global Platts March 9.

ZPC cracked 23 million mt of crude in 2020, according the the source. Platts data showed that the utilization rate of its phase 1 refinery hit as high as 130% in a few months last year.

Started construction in the second half of 2019, units of the Yuan 82.9 billion ($12.74 billion) phase 2 refinery almost mirror those in phase 1, which has two CDUs of 200,000 b/d each. But phase 1 has one 1.4 million mt/year ethylene unit while phase 2 plans to double the capacity with two ethylene units.

With the entire phase 2 project online, ZPC expects to lift its combined petrochemicals product yield to 71% from 65% for the phase 1 refinery, according to the source.

Zhejiang Petroleum, a joint venture between ZPC"s parent company Rongsheng Petrochemical and Zhejiang Energy Group, planned to build 700 gas stations in Zhejiang province by end-2022 as domestic retail outlets of ZPC.

Established in 2015, ZPC is a JV between textile companies Rongsheng Petrochemical, which owns 51%, Tongkun Group, at 20%, as well as chemicals company Juhua Group, also 20%. The rest 9% stake was reported to have transferred to Saudi Aramco from the Zhejiang provincial government. But there has been no update since the agreement was signed in October 2018.

Refinery based crude oil-to-chemicals (COTC) technology involves configuring a refinery to produce maximum chemicals instead of traditional transportation fuels. COTC complexes elevate petrochemical production to an unprecedented refinery scale. Due to the huge scale as well as the amount of target chemicals each COTC complex produces, COTC technology is expected to be disruptive, in terms of abrupt supply increase and price fluctuation, to the global petrochemical industry when each project starts. COTC is happening now with three refinery-PX projects, Hengli (Dalian, China), Zhejiang Phase 1(Zhejiang China), and Hengyi (Brunei) starting in 2019.

Hengli announced on May 17, 2019 that its COTC refinery-PX complex had achieved full line trial production. The complex is expected to produce 4.34 million tons of PX (paraxylene) per year, in addition to 3.9 million tons of other chemicals. The total chemical conversion per barrel of oil is estimated to be 42%. Hengli’s configuraton is mainly based on hydrocracking of diesel, gas oil, and vacuum residue with technologies licensed from Axens. PEP Report 303, published in December 2018, analyzed Hengli Petrochemical’s refinery-PX complex, provided PEP’s independent analysis of the process configuration and production economics.

Zhejiang Petroleum and Chemical (ZPC) Co.’s COTC refinery-PX project has two phases. Phase 1 is close to completion with several units in the intial trial operation. During the recent visit by S&P Global on May 23, 2019 to Rongsheng, the majority share holder of ZPC, said that full operation is expected in the third quarter of 2019. When completed, Phase 1 is expected to produce 4.0 million tons of PX, 1.5 million tons of benzene, 1.4 million tons of ethylene, and other downstream petrochemicals. The total chemical conversion per barrel of oil is about 45%.

ZPC’s configuration is mainly based on diesel hydrocracking with technology licensed from Chevron and gasoil hydrocracking with technology licensed from UOP. For vacuum residue upgradation, ZPC uses Delayed Coking (open art) and Residue Desulfurization followed by Residue Fluid Catalytic Cracking (RFCC) licensed from UOP. The Phase 2 project construction has also started, and when completed it will have a similar scale to Phase 1. However, the Phase 2 refinery configuration will be further enhanced by UOP to produce more mixed feeds to support two word-scale steam crackers as compared to one cracker for Phase 1. The total chemical conversion has been announced to increase to 50%, up from 45% in Phase 1. The number of downstream petrochemical units is also expected to differ from Phase 1.

The objective of this report (PEP 303A) is to analyze ZPC’s Phase 1 refinery-PX complex. Although Zhejiang Phase 1 project, as announced, includes a steam cracker and fifteen downstream petrochemical units, PEP 303A analysis will draw a boundary before steam cracker to focus on PX production economics to be compared to that of Hengli’s complex.

Section 1 introduces various crude oil-to-chemicals (COTC) approaches including directly feeding a light crude to steam cracker and configuring a refinery to produce maximum chemicals. In this section, we have discussed the merits and impacts of each approach, and why COTC is different from the conventional state-of-art refinery-petrochemical integration. We have elaborated the potential impact and implications of COTC on global petrochemical production.

Section 2 summarizes the overall PX production economics of Zhejiang Phase 1 refinery-PX complex. The economics are evaluated under a wide range of oil price scenarios and compared with Hengli’s project.

2021 marked the start of the central government’s latest effort to consolidate and tighten supervision over the refining sector and to cap China’s overall refining capacity.[14] Besides imposing a hefty tax on imports of blending fuels, Beijing has instituted stricter tax and environmental enforcement[15] measures including: performing refinery audits and inspections;[16] conducting investigations of alleged irregular activities such as tax evasion and illegal resale of crude oil imports;[17] and imposing tighter quotas for oil product exports as China’s decarbonization efforts advance.[18]

Yet, of the three most recent major additions to China’s greenfield refinery landscape, none are in Shandong province, home to a little over half the country’s independent refining capacity. Hengli’s Changxing integrated petrochemical complex is situated in Liaoning, Zhejiang’s (ZPC) Zhoushan facility in Zhejiang, and Shenghong’s Lianyungang plant in Jiangsu.[21]

As China’s independent oil refining hub, Shandong is the bellwether for the rationalization of the country’s refinery sector. Over the years, Shandong’s teapots benefited from favorable policies such as access to cheap land and support from a local government that grew reliant on the industry for jobs and contributions to economic growth.[22] For this reason, Shandong officials had resisted strictly implementing Beijing’s directives to cull teapot refiners and turned a blind eye to practices that ensured their survival.

In 2016, during the period of frenzied post-licensing crude oil importing by Chinese independents, Saudi Arabia began targeting teapots on the spot market, as did Kuwait. Iran also joined the fray, with the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) operating through an independent trader Trafigura to sell cargoes to Chinese independents.[27] Since then, the coming online of major new greenfield refineries such as Rongsheng ZPC and Hengli Changxing, and Shenghong, which are designed to operate using medium-sour crude, have led Middle East producers to pursue long-term supply contracts with private Chinese refiners. In 2021, the combined share of crude shipments from Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, and Kuwait to China’s independent refiners accounted for 32.5%, an increase of more than 8% over the previous year.[28] This is a trend that Beijing seems intent on supporting, as some bigger, more sophisticated private refiners whose business strategy aligns with President Xi’s vision have started to receive tax benefits or permissions to import larger volumes of crude directly from major producers such as Saudi Arabia.[29]

The shift in Saudi Aramco’s market strategy to focus on customer diversification has paid off in the form of valuable supply relationships with Chinese independents. And Aramco’s efforts to expand its presence in the Chinese refining market and lock in demand have dovetailed neatly with the development of China’s new greenfield refineries.[30] Over the past several years, Aramco has collaborated with both state-owned and independent refiners to develop integrated liquids-to-chemicals complexes in China. In 2018, following on the heels of an oil supply agreement, Aramco purchased a 9% stake in ZPC’s Zhoushan integrated refinery. In March of this year, Saudi Aramco and its joint venture partners, NORINCO Group and Panjin Sincen, made a final investment decision (FID) to develop a major liquids-to-chemicals facility in northeast China.[31] Also in March, Aramco and state-owned Sinopec agreed to conduct a feasibility study aimed at assessing capacity expansion of the Fujian Refining and Petrochemical Co. Ltd.’s integrated refining and chemical production complex.[32]

SINGAPORE, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Rongsheng Petrochemical, the trading arm of Chinese private refiner Zhejiang Petrochemical, has bought at least 5 million barrels of crude for delivery in December and January next year in preparation for starting a new crude unit by year-end, five trade sources said on Wednesday.

Rongsheng bought at least 3.5 million barrels of Upper Zakum crude from the United Arab Emirates and 1.5 million barrels of al-Shaheen crude from Qatar via a tender that closed on Tuesday, the sources said.

Rongsheng’s purchase helped absorbed some of the unsold supplies from last month as the company did not purchase any spot crude in past two months, the sources said.

Zhejiang Petrochemical plans to start trial runs at one of two new crude distillation units (CDUs) in the second phase of its refinery-petrochemical complex in east China’s Zhoushan by the end of this year, a company official told Reuters. Each CDU has a capacity of 200,000 barrels per day (bpd).

Zhejiang Petrochemical started up the first phase of its complex which includes a 400,000-bpd refinery and a 1.2 million tonne-per-year ethylene plant at the end of 2019. (Reporting by Florence Tan and Chen Aizhu, editing by Louise Heavens and Christian Schmollinger)

(Yicai Global) May 20 -- Zhejiang Petrochemical"s oil  refining project with an annual capacity of 40 million tons on Zhoushan has finished  construction and equipment installation in the first stage and will start running soon,   Ningbo, Zhejiang province-based Rongsheng Petrochemical, which is ZPC"s  controlling shareholder, announced this afternoon.

The project, on the island of Zhoushan in southeastern China"s Zhejiang province south of Shanghai at the mouth of Hangzhou Bay, has total investment of around CNY173 billion (USD25 billion). It is not only the largest petrochemical project that Chinese private firms have invested in, but its production scale is also one of the biggest worldwide. It has 22 refining and 15 chemical units, and its two stages have a similar scale and will be able to refine 40 million tons oil upon completion, the released data show.

Less petroleum demand and the associated lower petroleum product prices encouraged refinery closures, reducing global refining capacity, particularly in the United States, Europe, and Japan. However, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) notes that a number of new refinery projects are set to come online during 2022 and 2023, increasing capacity.

As global demand for petroleum products returned closer to pre-pandemic levels through 2021 and early 2022, the loss of refinery capacity contributed to higher crack spreads—the difference between the price of a barrel of crude oil and the wholesale price of petroleum products—which serve as one indicator of the profitability of refining.

Constraints on global refinery capacity have been contributing to higher crack spreads in the first half of 2022, and they are likely to continue contributing to high crack spreads through at least the end of this year.

In its June 2022 Oil Market Report, the IEA expects net global refining capacity to expand by 1.0 million b/d in 2022 and by an additional 1.6 million b/d in 2023. New refining capacity growth includes several high-profile, high-capacity refinery projects underway, particularly in China and the Middle East, which could add more than 4.0 million b/d of new capacity over the next two years.

The most global refining capacity under development is in China. Chinese capacity is scheduled to increase significantly this year because of the start of at least two new refinery projects and a major refinery expansion.

The first new refinery is the private Shenghong Petrochemical facility in Lianyungang, which has an estimated capacity of 320,000 b/d and reported trial crude oil-processing operations beginning in May 2022.

The second new refinery is PetroChina’s 400,000 b/d Jieyang refinery, in the southern Guangdong province, which is expected to come online in the third quarter of 2022 (3Q22). A planned 400,000 b/d Phase II capacity expansion also began operations earlier in 2022 at Zhejiang Petrochemical Corporation’s (ZPC) Rongsheng facility.

Most noteworthy among these additional expansions are the 300,000 b/d Huajin and the 400,000 b/d Yulong refinery projects, which both have target start dates in 2024.

Outside of China, the 300,000 b/d Malaysian Pengerang refinery restarted in May 2022 after a fire forced the refinery to shut down in March 2020. The refinery’s return is likely to decrease petroleum product prices and increase supply, particularly in south and southeast Asian markets.

Substantial refinery capacity was also added in the Middle East during the past year. The 400,000 b/d Jizan refinery in Saudi Arabia reportedly came online in late 2021 and began exporting petroleum products earlier this year.

More recently, the 615,000 b/d Al Zour refinery in Kuwait—the largest in the country when it becomes fully operational—began initial operations earlier this year and the facility’s operators expect to increase production through the end of 2022.

A new 140,000 b/d refinery is scheduled to come online in Karbala, Iraq, this September, targeting to be fully operational by 2023. A new 230,000 b/d refinery operated by a joint venture between state-owned-firms OQ (of Oman) and Kuwait Petroleum International is set to come online in Duqm, Oman, likely in early 2023.

The 650,000 b/d Dangote Industries refinery in Lagos, Nigeria, set to be the largest in the country when completed, may come online in late 2022 or 2023. The refinery would most likely meet Nigeria’s domestic petroleum product demand as well as demand in nearby African countries, and it would also reduce demand for gasoline and diesel imports into the region from Europe or the United States.

In Mexico, state-owned refiner Pemex has been building a 340,000 b/d refinery in Dos Bocas, which hosted an inauguration ceremony on 1 July, even though the refinery is still under construction and is unlikely to begin producing fuels until at least 2023.

TotalEnergies is planning to restart its 222,000 b/d Donges refinery along the Atlantic Coast of France in May 2022, after closing the facility in late 2020, and some reports indicate the facility has begun importing crude oil for processing.

In addition to major new refinery projects, other facilities are also moving forward with capacity expansions at existing refineries—particularly in India. HPCL’s Visakha Refinery is undergoing a major expansion, estimated at 135,000 b/d, which is scheduled to come online by 2023. A number of other similar expansions are underway in India that may come into effect in 2024 or later.

Although no projects to build new refineries in the United States are currently planned, major refinery expansions are underway at a handful of Gulf Coast refineries, most notably ExxonMobil’s Beaumont, Texas refinery, which plans to increase its capacity by 250,000 b/d by 2023.

If the projects mentioned above were to come online according to their present timelines, global refinery capacity would increase by 2.3 million b/d in 2022 and by 2.1 million b/d in 2023.

EIA cautions that the estimate is not necessarily a complete list of ongoing refinery capacity expansions. Moreover, many of these projects have also already been subject to major delays, and the possibility of partial starts or continued delays related to logistics, construction, labor, finances, political complications, or other factors may cause these projects to come online later than currently estimated.

Third MoU with Zhejiang Energy aimed at exploring potential investment in retail network in Eastern Region of China, in addition to other related downstream investments

Saudi Aramco today signed three Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) aimed at expanding its downstream presence in the Zhejiang province, one of the most developed regions in China. The company aims to acquire a 9% stake in Zhejiang Petrochemical’s 800,000 barrels per day integrated refinery and petrochemical complex, located in the city of Zhoushan.

The first agreement was signed with the Zhoushan government to acquire its 9% stake in the project. The second agreement was signed with Rongsheng Petrochemical, Juhua Group, and Tongkun Group, who are the other shareholders of Zhejiang Petrochemical. Saudi Aramco’s involvement in the project will come with a long-term crude supply agreement and the ability to utilize Zhejiang Petrochemical’s large crude oil storage facility to serve its customers in the Asian region.

An integral part of the project includes a third agreement with Zhejiang Energy to invest in a retail fuel network. The companies plan to build a large scale retail network over the course of the next five years in the Zhejiang province. The retail business will be integrated with the Zhejiang Petrochemical complex as an outlet for the refined products produced.

Saudi Aramco CEO, Amin Nasser said: “The agreements demonstrate our commitment to the Chinese market and help enhance the strategic integration of our downstream network in Asia. They will further strengthen our relationship with China and the Zhejiang province, setting the stage for more cooperation in the future.”

Phase I of the project will include a newly built 400,000 barrels per day refinery with a 1.4 mmtpa ethylene cracker unit, and a 5.2 mmtpa Aromatics unit. Phase II will see a 400,000 barrels per day refinery expansion, which will include deeper chemical integration than Phase I.

The fact that this landmark refinery joint venture is back under serious consideration underlines the extremely significant shift in Saudi Arabia’s geopolitical alliances in the past few years – principally away from the U.S. and its allies and towards China and its allies. Up until the 2014-2016 Oil Price War, intended by Saudi Arabia to destroy the then-nascent U.S. shale oil sector, the foundation of U.S.-Saudi relations had been the deal struck on 14 February 1945 between the then-U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Saudi King Abdulaziz. In essence, but analyzed in-depth inmy new book on the global oil markets,this was that the U.S. would receive all of the oil supplies it needed for as long as Saudi had oil in place, in return for which the U.S. would guarantee the security both of the ruling House of Saud and, by extension, of Saudi Arabia.

Later, the first discussions about the joint Saudi-China refining and petrochemical complex in China’s northeast began, with a bonus for Saudi Arabia being that Aramco was intended to supply up to 70 percent of the crude feedstock for the complex that was to have commenced operation in 2024. This, in turn, was part of a multiple-deal series that also included three preliminary agreements to invest in Zhejiang province in eastern China. The first agreement was signed to acquire a 9 percent stake in the greenfield Zhejiang Petrochemical project, the second was a crude oil supply deal signed with Rongsheng Petrochemical, Juhua Group, and Tongkun Group, and the third was with Zhejiang Energy to build a large-scale retail fuel network over five years in Zhejiang province.

New refinery start-ups in China are helping to absorb some of the crude oil from the Middle East amid an otherwise depressed market with stalled demand recovery.

Large private Chinese refiner Zhejiang Petrochemical has been buying millions of barrels of crude from the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Iraq in recent days, for delivery in December and January, oil traders told Reuters and Bloomberg.

Rongsheng Petrochemical, the trading arm of Zhejiang Petrochemical, has bought at least 5 million barrels of UAE’s Upper Zakum crude and Qatar’s al-Shaheen crude in a tender this week, trading sources told Reuters. According to traders who spoke to Bloomberg, Rongsheng Petrochemical has purchased at least 7 million barrels of crude from the Middle East.

The company was looking to procure oil from the Middle East as it prepares to begin trial runs at a new refinery by the end of this year, sources told Reuters.

Chinese private petrochemical group Zhejiang Rongsheng Holding has signed a framework agreement with state-run shipping conglomerate Cosco Shipping Group to form a strategic partnership.