Refiners seek oil product imports, but volumes not firm

By Hong Chou Hui in Singapore


March 15, 2011 - Japan could need to buy an extra 210,000 b/d of oil and other feedstocks to make up for 12 GW of lost power from the shutting of three nuclear plants after Friday's earthquake, Barclays Capital said in a report issued late Monday.


The country could need to buy 143,000 b/d of fuel oil, 67,000 b/d of crude, 7,800 mt/day of coal, and 16,400 mt/day of LNG. As LNG cargoes are typically 65,000 mt in size, this implies one cargo every four days.


Friday's earthquake led to the shutdown of at least 11 nuclear units, according to Japanese utilities. Tokyo Electric Power Company reported seven units shut at its Fukushima Daiichi and Daini plants, and Tohoku Electric a further three at its Onagawa facility. The total capacity of these three plants is roughly 12 GW, of which more than 9 GW was lost as a result of the earthquake.


Japan Atomic also shut a 1.1 GW unit at its Tokai plant after the earthquake. The total capacity of nuclear and thermal power plants that were shut due to the earthquake is 18.32 GW, according to a spokesman from Japan's Federation of Electric Power Companies.

Over the weekend, Tepco restarted all its hydro power stations that had been shut, it said in a posting on its website Sunday. But its nine thermal power-generation units are still shut.

Japan could move away from nuclear generation post-quake


BarCap added that it was unlikely that both Fukushima plants would return to service as "the undamaged units remain an unacceptable risk to operate, given the threat of future earthquakes and tsunamis, even if the remainder of the plants are intact enough and not too contaminated to allow the operation of the unaffected reactors."


While the shutting of thermal power plants was likely to result in a drop in demand for fuels, requirements would still pick up in the long run on the back of nuclear outages, BarCap said.


"Power loads are unlikely to recover to their pre-earthquake levels in 2011," BarCap added, as commercial and industrial facilities had been damaged or destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami.


Grid limitations would also limit the amount of power that could be moved from the country's west which was unscathed by the recent natural disaster to the northeastern Japan which suffered the greatest nuclear outages.

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