BP to import due to Balongan outage

BP to import due to Balongan outage

SINGAPORE (Reuters): British Petroleum will purchase gasoline to cover a shortfall caused by an outage at Indonesia's 125,000 barrel-per-day Balongan refinery, a BP source said yesterday.

BP lifts 150,000 barrels per month of the higher octane 97, 95 and 92-octane gasoline from Balongan, but the company source said the amount of gasoline they expect to replace with imports is "a lot more than 150,000 barrels".

"We don't know how much yet, it depends", said the source.

On Friday, the processing director of Indonesia's Pertamina state oil company, Samto Utomo, said he had ordered the crude distillation unit (CDU) at the refinery to be operated at 60 percent of capacity from Friday.

The Balongan refinery had been shut twice since late-April owing to a technical problem in one of the residue catalytic cracker (RCC) units.