By OGJ editors
HOUSTON, Mar. 11 -- Valero Energy Corp. has agreed to buy Chevron Corp.’s 220,000-b/d refinery at Pembroke, Wales, for $730 million plus a payment for working capital estimated at $1 billion.
In addition to the refinery, the deal includes ownership interests in four product pipelines and 11 fuel terminals, a 14,000-b/d aviation fuels business, and more than 1,000 Texaco-branded wholesale sites in the UK and Ireland.
Valero Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Bill Klesse said purchase of the complex refinery, which has run more than 60 types of crude in the past decade, envisions product supply to the US.
“After exiting refining in the US East Coast last year, this acquisition provides an opportunity for our company to supply that market more competitively when it’s economic to do so,” he said.
Valero last year sold a refinery in Delaware City to Petroplus Holdings and a refinery in Paulsboro, NJ, to PBF Holding Co. LLC.
For Chevron, said Mike Wirth, executive vice-president, Chevron Downstream & Chemicals, the sale fits a strategy of focusing globally on areas of strength.
“We’re concentrating our downstream portfolio primarily in North America and the Asia-Pacific region, markets where we enjoy our greatest competitive strength and opportunities for growth,” he said.
In Europe, Chevron will keep its upstream, lubricants, and Oronite additives businesses, as well as its aviation business in Sweden, Greece, and Benelux countries.
The Pembroke refinery yields 44% gasoline, 40% distillates, 11% fuel oil, and 5% other products, Valero said.
According to Oil & Gas Journal’s Worldwide Refining Report, the refinery’s processing capacities include visbreaking, 26,000 b/d; fluid catalytic cracking, 90,000 b/d; and continuous regenerative catalytic reforming, 39,000 b/d (OGJ, Dec. 6, 2010, p. 45). It has 95,000 b/d of vacuum distillation capacity.
Catalytic hydrotreating capacities at Pembroke are 48,300 b/d for cat reformer feed, 60,000 b/d for diesel desulfurization, and 49,500 b/d for FCC naphtha.
The refinery also has capacities of 32,500 b/d of HF alkylation, 19,900 b/d of butane isomerization, and 12,000 b/d of pentane-hexane isomerization.
