COLOMBO: Ceylon Petroleum Corp (Ceypetco) will resume operation of Sri Lanka’s sole refinery, a 50,000 barrels-per-day facility, after a 10-day closure, because it has received a cargo of 75,000 tonnes of crude from Dubai, officials said.
Sri Lanka’s decades-old refinery is configured to run on Iranian crude and has been scrambling to fill a shortfall after Western sanctions prevented it from bringing in the crude from Iran. The sanctions have hurt its economy by forcing it to spend more to import oil and oil products.
The refinery was shut on October 26 after exhausting its supply of mainly Iranian crude oil, and its general manager, Susantha Silva, said it would be shut until the island nation received the Dubai cargo.
“We have received a 75,000-metric-tonne crude cargo and everything is arranged to unload,” Silva said in an interview yesterday. “If all goes well, we’ll be able to resume operations from tomorrow.”
Silva declined to comment on the origin of the cargo, but an oil ministry official said it came from Dubai. “The cargo came from Dubai the day before yesterday and everything is now ready to unload,” the official said, on condition of anonymity.
He said the island nation would receive an 80,000 tonne crude cargo from Oman on Thursday, a 135,000 tonne cargo from Saudi Aramco November 13-15 and another 135,000 tonne shipment in December. Silva last week said the December shipment was from Abu Dhabi.
Exports from Iran, have fallen sharply as buyers struggle to pay for the oil and secure insurance cover for tankers to ship it.
AFP
