Asia’s energy thirst will stretch refiners

Asian demand for gasoline and other petroleum products is likely to outstrip refining capacity for the rest of the decade, even as new plants start up in countries like China, Caltex Australia said Thursday.

“For a long time demand and production capacity ran very close to each other, but now they’ve begun to widen, and that differential is filled by imports from the Mediterranean and the Middle East, primarily,” the Caltex Australia chief executive, Dave Reeves said in an interview. Project delays mean new refineries and expansions “are coming onstream more slowly than we would have anticipated.”

International Herald Tribune