(Argus, 6.May.2020) — PetroPeru’s 12,000 b/d Iquitos refinery in the northern jungle is currently closed. Its 553,200 bl of storage is full.
The 15,500 b/d Conchan refinery in Lima was closed for most of March, but restarted in late April at 50pc capacity.
PetroPeru’s 65,000 b/d Talara plant on the northern coast was shut down at the end of last year as part of a $5.4bn upgrade that will increase capacity to 95,000 b/d. Work on the project stopped with the lockdown, but Barrientos said the goal of completing the project in the first half of 2021 remains intact. Talara has storage capacity of 3.55mn bl.
He said PetroPeru had trimmed $80mn in operating costs and would forgo $250mn in investments because of the crisis.
PetroPeru announced on 1 May that it was shutting down its 100,000 b/d crude pipeline in the northern jungle. The companies that use the pipeline, Canada’s Frontera and Argentina’s Pluspetrol, have shut in production on their blocks.
“We hope to reactivate the line as soon as possible, but understand that this is not going to be immediate and we have a few hard months in front of us,” Barrientos said.
According to an Argus analysis, Latin America’s aging refinery fleet is currently running at about one-third of its aggregate design capacity of roughly 7.5mn b/d.
— By Lucien Chauvin
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