Singapore: Kuwait can export up to 300,000 tonnes a month of low-sulphur fuel oil (LSFO) when the country's new 615,000 barrels per day (bpd) refinery comes up in 2010-2011, an official with Kuwait Petroleum Corp (KPC) said yesterday.
This will be the first time the state refiner, which exports only supercracked fuel oil, will be producing LSFO to meet new local emission standards for use mostly by domestic oil-fired thermal plants, said Emad Al Abdul Karim, KPC's manager of planning and marketing.
"The new refinery at Al Zour is designed mainly for this purpose. It can produce up to one million tonnes of straight-run LSFO a year, which will be used mainly for domestic power generation," he told Reuters on the sidelines of an oil conference.
"We can sell up to 300,000 tonnes a month during the low-demand winter season but how much we actually sell will depend very much on the market at the time and our own inventory levels."
The one per cent sulphur fuel oil is expected to be sold into East Asia.
