Calcasieu Refining will in the first week of February restart its 136,000 b/d refinery in Calcasieu, Louisiana, the company said today.
The restart would restore operations at a facility idled at the end of July as low fuel demand drained refining margins. Calcasieu produces naphtha, an intermediate blended directly into gasoline or processed in reformers into a higher-octane gasoline blendstock called reformate, and also used as a petrochemical feedstock.
Chief executive Russ Willmon confirmed the restart today.
Transportation fuel demand flattened by efforts to limit the spread of Covid-19 and a historic hurricane season that pummeled eastern Louisiana, where Calcasieu sits, combined to idle more than 700,000 b/d of crude refining capacity in the state last year. That volume was more than double the second-largest state for refinery closures, of 330,000 b/d of capacity in Pennsylvania.
