Singapore — China’s refinery crude throughput rose 8% year on year to 49.78 million mt in June, or an average 12.16 million b/d, preliminary data from the National Bureau of Statistics released Monday showed.
Meanwhile, June crude throughput was up 2.5% month on month on a barrel per day basis, rebounding from a two-month consecutive drop in May. It was only slightly lower from a record high of 12.18 million b/d in March, according to S&P Global Platts calculations based on NBS data.
The month-on-month increase on b/d basis, was mainly attributed to higher run rates at state-owned refineries in June, which restarted from maintenance, despite lower run rates at the country’s independent refineries.
China’s Shandong independent refineries had cut run rates to a 10-month low of 59.4% in June, due to heavy scheduled maintenance, which have seen lower refining margins.
On the other hand, the country’s state-owned refiners Sinopec, PetroChina, Sinochem and China National offshore Oil Corp. raised their planned average refinery run rate to 79% of nameplate capacity in June, from 76% in May, the first rebound after three consecutive months of declines, according to a Platts survey earlier.
In the first half of 2018, total refinery crude throughput across China was up 8.9% year on year to 299.61 million mt, or 12.13 million b/d, NBS data showed.
Meanwhile, China’s crude oil production in June fell 2.3% year on year to 15.85 million mt, or 3.87 million b/d.
Over January-June, crude output was down 2% year on year at 94.09 million mt, averaging 3.81 million b/d, Platts calculations based on NBS data showed. Natural gas production rose 5.6% year on year at 12.2 Bcm in June, and up 4.6% year on year over January-June at 77.5 Bcm, NBS data showed.
–Staff, [email protected]
–Edited by Norazlina Juma’at, [email protected]
Source: S&P Global Platts
