Petroplus to receive fifth tanker at UK refinery

Petroplus Holdings AG, the Swiss refiner fighting to avoid bankruptcy, is due to receive a fifth tanker at Corytonne in the UK since the end of December, ensuring output continues at the larger of its two operating plants.

The Lian Xing Hu, which has shipped average cargoes of about 58,000 metric tonnes over the past six months, is scheduled to arrive at the plant on January 21 from the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, the export terminal for Russian Urals crude, according to AISLive ship-tracking data on Bloomberg. Fredrik Olsson, a Petroplus spokesman at Zug in Switzerland, didn’t immediately return a telephone call and e-mail seeking comment.

The Corytonne plant near London has been running at 45 per cent of its 220,000 barrel-a-day capacity after credit lines were frozen by lenders at the end of last year, crippling the refiner’s ability to buy crude supplies for its five facilities.

Petroplus has received about 3 million barrels of crude at the UK facility since December 31. BP Plc is “monitoring the situation carefully” as it is “one of a number of companies that takes supply” from the plant, David Nicholas, a London- based spokesman for Europe’s second-largest oil company, said on January 15.

Petroplus, Europe’s largest independent refiner, was running its Ingolstadt refinery in Germany at 55 per cent of its 110,000 barrel-a-day capacity. The company reached a temporary funding agreement to continue operations at Ingolstadt and Corytonne, it said in a January 11 statement. Petroplus was also in negotiations with a third party for crude and feedstock supplies to the two sites, it said.

The company closed its Petit Couronne site in France, Antwerp facility in Belgium, and was scheduled to start halting operations at Cressier in Switzerland this week after depleting crude stocks, it said in the statement.