By Winnie Zhu and Wang Ying
Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) -- China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., Asia's biggest oil refiner, will process less crude-oil at refineries with ``relatively low profitability'' because of falling fuel demand, its parent said.
The company will maintain processing rates at plants that are making ``strong profits,'' China Petrochemical Corp. said in a statement posted in its newsletter Sinopecnews today, without giving details.
China, the world's second-biggest energy user, slashed crude-processing by 7 percent in September to 6.89 million barrels a day from a record in July, when the government increased stockpiles for the Olympic Games. The nation's fuel and petrochemical demand growth will ease in 2009 as the economy slows, Sinopec, as China Petroleum is known, said last month.
``As demand falls and stockpiles rise, domestic refineries will adjust processing volumes based on regional market demand, sale prices and the availability of transport,'' Sinopec's Vice President Zhang Jianhua said in the statement.
China's fuel demand growth may ease to an average 4 percent for the rest of the year as a slowing economy cuts consumption, CNPC Research Institute of Economics and Technology said in a report last month. Fuel consumption has climbed about 5.5 percent in the first eight months, according to the research unit of the nation's largest oil company.
Demand for crude oil may rise to between 410 million and 420 million metric tons by 2010, compared with last year's 380 million tons, Xu Yongfa, the head of the research unit, said today at a coal conference in Beijing.
The Chinese economy, the world's fourth-largest, grew at the slowest pace in five years in the three months through September as export orders shrank and industrial production waned. The expansion cooled for a fifth straight quarter, to a 9 percent gain from a year earlier.
To contact the reporters on this story: Winnie Zhu in Shanghai at wzhu4@bloomberg.netWang Ying in Beijing at ywang30@bloomberg.net
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