Attock Refinery suspends furnace oil production

Attock Refinery Ltd said on Tuesday it’s temporarily shutting down one of its main processing units for eight days owing to “ullage constraints” arising out of low demand for furnace oil. Ullage refers to the empty space in a refinery’s storage tanks. In other words, buyers of furnace oil aren’t lifting the product from the refinery, which has forced the crude oil processor to halt operations for the time being. As a result, the refinery will operate at a capacity of 35 per cent. Adequate inventories of different products, however, will remain available to meet any immediate requirement, the company said. Speaking to Dawn on Tuesday, a veteran of the refining industry said the situation is a direct outcome of furnace oil–based independent power producers (IPPs) not being despatched by the country’s sole electricity purchaser. The national power buyer asks all kinds of IPPs to generate electricity based on the so-called merit order, which ranks these firms in the ascending order of price per unit. “The same thing happened last year when all refineries were left with huge stocks of furnace oil,” he said while blaming the government for leaving the five refineries high and dry every year.