Naphthenic base oil producer San Joaquin Refining confirmed yesterday that it has imposed sales allocations on some grades, in part because a portion of its Bakersfield, Calif., plant is temporarily closed for maintenance.
The plants hydrotreating and hydrofinishing unit shut down Friday for catalyst replacement, which is scheduled to take three weeks. That unit accounts for approximately half of the plants capacity of 7,300 barrels per day. The level of allocation varies for different grades. The company is sold out of transformer oil.
In January San Joaquin had warned customers that the turnaround might force it to cap sales. Yesterday the company told Lube Report it tried to build inventories, butits efforts were hampered by power outages that wiped out seven days of production. One of the outages was the result of damage caused by a rail car accident. Some of the downtime was due to overloading of the local electricity network.
The plants solvent extraction unit – which accounts for the remaining capacity – is scheduled to close March 26 for two weeks of routine maintenance, but San Joaquin said it doesnt anticipate imposing more allocations because of that event.
Posted prices for paraffinic base oils were unchanged this week. The price of crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange closed yesterday at $62.91 per barrel, according to Bloomberg. That was $1.42 higher than a week earlier.
Historic U.S. posted base oil prices and WTI and Brent crude spot prices are available for purchase in Excel format.