India's Reliance reports successful restart of Jamnagar FCCU unit

Quantum Commodity Intelligence – Reliance Industries Ltd said it has successfully restarted the downed secondary unit at its export Jamnagar refinery in Gujarat following an outage earlier in the month.

"Further to our communication dated June 9, 2021, we wish to inform that the Fluidized Catalytic Cracker Unit (FCCU) in our SEZ refinery at Jamnagar which was taken for an emergency shutdown on June 6, 2021 has been restarted after carrying out necessary repairs.

"The Unit has since been stabilised and normal throughput has been reached today," the firm announced in a filing to the stock exchanges.

Reliance has two refineries at Jamnagar - a 35.2-million mt a year only-for-exports unit and a 33-million mt plant catering to the domestic market.

The FCCU outage had impacted Asian gasoline prices, with Quantum reporting earlier in the month a $0.50/barrel increase in benchmark Singapore 92 RON cracks, firming to over +$6/b versus Brent.

However, gasoline cracks gave up three days of gains Monday amid fresh curbs on travel to combat rising Covid infection rates in Southeast Asia, with the July swap crack dropping $0.66/b to $6.40/b.

At the time of the outage, Reliance warned, "some product shipments may get delayed and we are working to minimize the impact on our customers."

An FCCU unit converts heavier fuels into lighter products, including gasoline.