re: So what is the status of the LNG facilities around Lake Chuck?

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I can tell you no refineries around lake Charles is talking about shutting down temporarily lol and as far as I know no chemical plants have had that discussion either

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They likely won't, for at least a while, either. At least until their product storage tanks are full and every barge they can get their hands on is riding barely above the waterline. When feedstocks are as cheap as they are right now, you tend to make as much as you feasibly can and put as much into storage as you can for later (given the constraints of economics and lifetime of the product in storage and things like that). There is a limit, though, and if the plants are producing at a higher rate than demand once they reach the point where their storage capacity is saturated, they will be forced to shut down or reduce rates to match demand. Most of them are REALLY good at avoiding shutdowns, though, because those are outrageously expensive in terms of real dollars and lost institutional knowledge when your trained up people have to go other places or choose not to return when you restart. So, they'll make a big effort to properly forecast what they should be producing to produce as much as possible to build up a stock of cheaply produced inventory (while possibly having to reduce rates along the way), but avoiding shutdowns if at all possible.

As this progresses, you'll see some plants running production down over time until they hit the lowest rates they can safely operate. Then they'll quit spending money trying to make their product to specification, and just send everything they produce to the flare to burn up. For a lot of plants (and especially refineries), a shutdown is so expensive that it's cheaper to just run as slow as possible and set things on fire if you expect a recovery to occur before you've flared so much material that the shutdown becomes the cheaper option. How much oil at $20 a barrel can you set on fire before you start approaching the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars shutting down and starting back up will cost?

Shutdowns and startups are also high risk times that the frickup fairy might visit and blow your plant to hell, too, so there's a safety aspect involved in avoiding shutdowns (ESPECIALLY unplanned shutdowns) at all costs.

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I know some refineries are cutting production and some are talking about temporarily shutting down operations temporarily.

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which ones?

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I can tell you no refineries around lake Charles is talking about shutting down temporarily

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They usually don't try to broadcast that

Where you at?

Let me rephrase, what refinery are you in? I know some refineries are balls to the wall, Motiva PAR for example, because they ship a shite ton to South America where the demand hasn’t dropped like it has in the US, Europe, and Asia. I thought P66 was reduced but am openly saying I’m not 100% sure.

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This is an issue. We were to start a month long TA at the end of April. It’ll be interesting their path forward. Haven’t heard of any changes yet, but we have some pretty critical equipment being installed that’s been on hold for a while.

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At least it's a planned turnaround. It gives an opportunity to possibly extend the turnaround and delay restart (if that's possible). Maybe get a few extra maintenance type projects completed that weren't previously planned. You probably won't be able to be down long enough to get any extra CapEx projects in there, but maybe you give maintenance some extra cash to go in there and do some wishlist type of stuff. Maybe give ops and engineering some cash to do small debottlenecking or process improvement projects that are centered around piping and things that are readily available that don't require long lead time items.

It'll be interesting to see who does what and how, that's for sure.

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thought P66 was reduced but am openly saying I’m not 100% sure.

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1st of the month is tomorrow.

A lot of people may wake up and walk into severely reduced rates. They just aren't in a position to know.