We’re Now Monitoring 85% of U.S. Refining Capacity
Our New Refineries Product Will Provide Daily Updates On Outages Up to Three Days Before Industry Reporting
We know that refineries are the life force of the petroleum industry for an energy trader and even slight changes in their operations can critically alter oil supply information. Yet, past reporting on refinery outages has hardly been timely. We’re changing that with the launch of our refinery outage product, a daily data feed that detects maintenance activity changes up to three days before existing reporting services.
Energy sector participants, including investors, traders, analysts, and reporters, will now be able to accurately identify the start and finish of maintenance activity at nearly all U.S. refineries. More importantly, our Refinery Product will provide critical supply production information up to 72 hours before current reporting methods.
Developed over the past six months in consultation with leading energy traders, this new product complements our existing multi-year global oil inventory tools to provide a comprehensive and timely view into global energy markets.
The technology driving our Refinery Product is geolocation monitoring, which we use to objectively identify relevant staffing changes at the refinery plant level. We compare the data we draw to the planned maintenance forecasts of refinery operators, who plan their routine turnarounds years in advance. Private sources report on these planned turnarounds and rely upon estimates that often change, as market conditions may cause companies to adjust their plans.
With our Refinery Product, turnaround crews, overtime hours and extra weekend shifts will be reported to the hour with simultaneous coverage of over 15.5 million barrels per day, representing over 85% of U.S. refining capacity.
Subscribers will receive this data as a daily time series and they can set up customized alert notifications of anomalous activity. This allows customers to improve and refine the accuracy of their supply-demand models. It cuts down the lag in current available information, biases in information released by refinery operators themselves, and uses one methodology to ensure reporting is consistent from plant to plant. The result is data consistency and accuracy on a scale never achieved before.
To give you an example what we’re talking about, our Refinery Productdetected a sizeable spike in the number of mobile devices at the PBF Chalmette Refinery, located near New Orleans, from March to June 2018, corresponding to a turnaround that was absent in maintenance forecasts. News sources later confirmed a week after the fact that a flaring event on March 10, 2018, “was the result of an accident at the facility during a “turnaround” maintenance project, and was not reported in advance to the state.” Having such information sooner will help energy traders better assess the impact on Gulf Coast refineries from similar incidents and enable them to make more timely and better informed trading decisions.
Geolocation data offers nearly continuous snapshots of ground activity and represents a powerful addition to our already extensive datasets. Orbital Insight’s multi-source platform enables traders and analysts to derive insights from otherwise opaque performance and efficiency benchmarks to improve strategic decision making.
And our Refinery Product isn’t just about integrity of data. It’s also about ethics. Orbital Insight does not receive any PII (Personal Identification Information) from our geolocation suppliers. The aggregation of the data removes any pseudo-anonymous data, resulting in large quantities of unidentifiable pings. Orbital Insight only sources geolocation data from vendors who explicitly comply with our ethics policy and user opt-in processing for appropriate third-party use of their location data.
Interested in Evaluating Orbital Insight Refineries? Request a Demo.
