Italy's Eni will resume bitumen and base oils production and supply at its 88,400 b/d Livorno refinery in the coming weeks, more than a month after it said it had begun the process of restarting the plant.
Eni said today it is gradually restarting processing units at Livorno, and that "some production lines are already operating according to product specification" while others "will be in the next few days".
The firm said on 31 July that it would that day begin restarting some of the refinery's fuel production lines after three months of planned maintenance, but there have been no indications that this has happened, and no seaborne crude arrived at the refinery in August.
Italian bitumen customers have now been told that Eni will resume bitumen production and some domestic truck deliveries from Livorno from 10-11 September. The firm has offered a Group I base oils cargo of up to 5,000t — a mixture of SN500 and brightstock — for export shipment from Livorno in mid-September. No plans have yet been indicated to market participants on resuming bitumen cargo exports from Livorno, with one market participant saying the resumed truck shipments could be small-scale and geared to meeting specific customer requirements for higher specification grades.
Some market participants said in April that Livorno was unlikely to restart at all after its planned turnaround, which began on 29 April, given loss-making margins at the simple topping refinery and on repeatedly mooted plans to build a hydrogenated vegetable oil (HVO) plant at the site. Eni had told unions in autumn 2021 that crude distillation at Livorno would halt at the start of 2022.
