* Sri Lanka has got
75,000 T crude cargo from Dubai
* Refinery, closed on
Oct. 26, to restart on Tuesday
* Ceypetco struggles to
buy Iranian oil due to sanctions (Adds details on future cargoes in paragraph
7)
By Ranga Sirilal and
Shihar Aneez
COLOMBO, Nov 5 (Reuters)
- 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
Oct. 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 on Monday. "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 Nov. 13-15 and another 135,000 tonne
shipment in December.
Silva last week said the
December shipment was from Abu Dhabi.
Exports from Iran, which
is grappling with tough Western sanctions against its energy and petrochemical
sectors, have fallen sharply as buyers struggle to pay for the oil and secure
insurance cover for tankers to ship it.
Ceypetco has been having
problems running the refinery at full capacity because alternative crudes such
as Arabian light do not provide the proper yield, Silva said earlier.
The sanctions have so
far compelled Sri Lanka's $59 billion economy to spend an extra $1.2
billion on oil imports, Oil Minister Susil Premajayantha told parliament last
month.
Sri Lanka has reduced
imports of Iranian crude by a fifth this year but disagrees with Western
sanctions that are punishing countries that depend on the oil, Foreign Minister
G.L. Peiris has said.
The country is now in
talks with Iran to find a suitable payment method, because banks dealing with Iran have
also been targeted by Western sanctions. Iran has not offered any discounts on
its crude, Peiris said.
Ceypetco's Sapugaskanda
refinery, on the outskirts of the capital, Colombo, was shut early in September
also after damage to a floating pipeline at the Colombo port. (Reporting by
Shihar Aneez; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Jane Baird)
