A refinery at Maoming in China's Guangdong province is marked for expansion in a deal partly financed by a U.K. company.
Maoming Petrochemical Corp. (MPC) plans to install a residual fluid catalytic cracker at its refinery in a $29.25 million project.
This will raise plant capacity to 13.5 million metric tons/year from 8.5 million metric tons/year. A construction schedule has not been disclosed.
About $20 million of the project capital is to be raised by Fortune Oil plc, London. MPC will provide the balance.
Fortune will receive repayments on the loan and guaranteed processing of 500,000 metric tons/year of crude oil at the plant.
The company also will benefit from increased crude throughput at its nearby import terminal, which it is currently building to supply the refinery.
Rupert Lycett Green, U.K. operations manager for Fortune, said his company, which supplies crude oil and products to China, intends to expand by ownership of a refinery.
Fortune is building a single point mooring unit 15 km offshore from MPC's refinery. Due on stream this year, the unit will be able to handle vessels as large as 250,000 dwt.
Crude oil imports to the refinery have been limited because current berths in the port serving the plant can accommodate vessels only as large as 50,000 dwt.
LPG VENTURE
Fortune also is involved in a $10 million joint venture to build and operate a liquefied petroleum gas storage and bottling plant at Zhanjiang, Guangxi province.
The company sells LPG in the region, and expects to have the LPG plant completed in 2 years from receipt of government permits.
The LPG plant will have storage capacity of 8,000 cu m. This will be expandable to 20,000 cu m of LPG as consumers increasingly use LPG instead of coal as fuel.
Lycett Green said LPG plant throughput is expected to be 30,000 metric tons in the first year of operation. Throughput is to reach 50,000 metric tons/year in the fourth year of operation.
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