Eni's Livorno refinery to run out of bitumen by end-Feb

Market: Oil products
01/02/24

The last remaining bitumen stocks at Eni's 88,400 b/d Livorno refinery in northern Italy will run out in about a month after Italian integrated Eni said it was getting ready to halt crude distillation at the plant.

The firm earlier this week confirmed it would convert the refinery to a hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) manufacturing unit.

The last crude tanker at Livorno was the Valpiave, which left the port on 25 January, according to Argus tracking, and no more crude tankers are signalling arrival. Eni is expected by market participants to supply around 10,000t of bitumen from remaining production and storage levels until those volumes run out at Livorno, which was an important domestic truck supplier and Mediterranean cargo exporter of bitumen until 2019.

The refinery has been plagued by outages in recent years and since the third quarter of 2021 has largely been running at minimal levels of around 50,000 b/d. There were also two periods totalling eight months, at the start of 2022 and in mid-2023, when no crude was delivered and output from the refinery output was sharply restricted.

One market participant estimated only around 80,000t out of a production capacity of around 400,000t of bitumen was produced in 2023.

The refinery exported up to 250,000t of the product in bitumen tankers in 2018 and in 2019, according to Vortexa data. This changed in 2020 when exports collapsed to around 92,000t, at which level they remained in 2021.

No bitumen cargoes were exported from Livorno in 2022, but flows resumed between January and March 2023 before ceasing again as the refinery went into a three-month planned maintenance in April.

Bitumen production restarted in mid-September last year, but this was short-lived. Output halted for just under a month between the end of October and the end of November because of technical issues with the refinery's vacuum distillation unit (VDU) that required special maintenance to bring it back online. After a stuttering restart of bitumen output at the refinery, Eni resumed bitumen cargo exports with a part-cargo loaded on the 6,180dwt Iver Balance following an initial loading at Eni's 88,400 b/d Taranto refinery in southern Italy in December. The combined cargo was delivered into Mohammedia, Morocco.

By Tom Woodlock

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