Reuters reported that Taiwan's Formosa Petrochemical Corporation will slash runs at its 540,000 barrels per day refinery in March 2011 to about 56% of total capacity because of a planned maintenance.

A spokesman for Formosa Petrochemical Corporation said that "We are shutting down crude distillation unit No. 1, a residue desulphurizing unit and a residual fluid catalytic cracker in March 2011 for maintenance. The other two crude units will continue to run, but their total runs will have to be reduced to 300,000 barrels per day because of the shutdown of the RDS."

Formosa operates three CDUs of equal capacity, at 180,000 each. No. 1 CDU and the 84,000 barrels per day RFCC will be idled for about 40 days, starting mid March 2011. It has another 84,000 barrels per day RFCC in the Mailiao plant.

Formosa exports 1 to 2 medium range of spot 93 octane gasoline cargoes a month on the average. It sold a parcel for late February recently at premiums of less than 80 cents a barrel to Singapore spot quotes on a free on board basis, but had no spot cargoes for sale for January lifting.

Formosa also operates another RDS unit, but that was damaged by a fire in July 2010. The unit will probably resume operations in the second half of the year.

(Sourced from www.reuters.com)