An official of the state-owned Chinese Petroleum Corp (中油,CPC) told Bridge News yesterday that there was no threat of a shortage of oil products due to the closure of CPC's Taoyuan oil refinery by the earthquake that struck the island yesterday since the oil company has ample stockpiles.
Separately, sources also mentioned that Taoyuan was operating only at about 85 percent of capacity before the disaster.
Market players in Singapore saw little impact on Taiwan's gas oil exports and jet fuel buys in the aftermath of the earthquake that hit the island yesterday. The quake disrupted power supplies causing the shutdown of the Taoyuan oil refinery which is part of the state-owned Chinese Petroleum Corp (
Traders say that CPC should continue exporting its usual cargo of 0.5% sulfur gas oil per month.
This is due to the fact that domestic gas oil specifications have a more stringent sulfur standard.
There were a few traders who said that CPC might scale back gas oil exports.
But the company had already completed its October export program and will tender to sell November gas oil barrels at a later date, a CPC official said.
Most importantly, traders said was the fact that CPC's 570,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) Kaohsiung refinery and terminal were understood to be operating normally.
Elsewhere, there was some talk that two storage tanks at Taoyuan, which has a total capacity of 200,000bpd, were leaking, but this could not be immediately verified.
One of the tanks with a capacity of 5,000kl was said to contain gasoline, with the other tank's capacity said to be 2,000 kl.
Traders also mentioned possible damage to oil and water pipelines as a result of the earthquake, but details were sketchy.
Traders believed that Taiwan was unlikely to buy more than its usual quantity of 32,000 tons of jet fuel per month.
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