LONDON: A diesel-producing upgrade at Turkey's Izmit refinery will now start production at the end of the first quarter, a company spokesman confirmed on Wednesday, leaving the country heavily reliant on imports.
"We're not at the finished stage," said Jonathan Lamb, a spokesman for Tupras, Turkey's sole refiner. "We plan to be properly operational, producing fuel we can sell, by the end of the first quarter."
The facility officially opened in December, but products from it are now unlikely to hit the market until around April, traders said. The $3 billion addition to the 220,000-barrel-per-day refinery will add much-needed diesel production to Turkey, which imported around 95 percent of the roughly 73.5 million barrels of the fuel it consumed in 2013, the latest annual data available showed.
The addition will enable the refinery to process 4.2 million tonnes of low-value fuel oil, which is no longer consumed in most sectors due to government sulphur regulations, into 3.5 million tonnes of high-quality refined products such as diesel, jet fuel and gasoline.
In the meantime, Turkey, one of the biggest fuel importers in the Mediterranean, is pulling in diesel cargoes from elsewhere in the region, which was complicated this week by severe winter storms that closed the Bosphorus Strait.
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.