BANGKOK: Thailand's oil refiner Bangchak Petroleum Pcl has declared a force majeure to temporarily stop an export of a 16 million litres of low sulphur fuel oil to a Japanese firm, its president said on Thursday.
The force majeure will affect the delivery of the cargo because the refiner has to reserve some fuel oil for power generation, Anusorn Sangnummuan told Reuters.
The incident happened after Myanmar unexpectedly stopped supplying natural gas to Thailand between May 6-9 because of an outage at the Yetagun field, which forced the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) to shift to fuel oil.
Sutat Patmasiriwat, governor at state-owned EGAT, Thailand's sole power distributor, the situation was back to normal now.
"It's normal for EGAT to use fuel oil or diesel in case of an disruption of natural gas supply. It happened only short period and it's over," he said.
The incident has resulted in a drop in fuel oil inventory and it needed to refill the shortfall, Sutat said.