TotalEnergies chief flags refining capacity squeeze before winter
Patrick Pouyanné's warnings about lost capacity follow outages that have run for months, from Saudi Arabia to the fallout of the war with Iran.
Published
Patrick Pouyanné, chief executive of TotalEnergies, has warned this year that too much global refining capacity is offline, a strain he has linked to outages at his own company and beyond.
In June, Pouyanné told France's National Assembly that TotalEnergies' 460,000 barrel-per-day SATORP refinery in Saudi Arabia was running at only 70% of capacity after three drone strikes in April, and would not fully recover until after 2026, OilPrice.com reported.
Earlier, in March, he told CNBC that about 15% of TotalEnergies' production was offline because of the war with Iran, and that refining margins had reached levels the world had "never experienced."
The pressure has not been confined to Total. U.S. refineries were running at about 97% of capacity by late August, Marketplace reported, as fall maintenance work added to strain from capacity lost elsewhere in the world ahead of winter.
The capacity pinch is a near-term drag on margins and fuel prices, but it does not change the growth case Total is building around its Granmorgu and Papua LNG projects, which the company counts as its main drivers of expansion in the years ahead.