Coal chemical industry: Profitability from coal-to-oil conversion

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Yitai releases its semi-annual report for 2015: coal-to-oil operations remain profitable 2015-8-27 On August 25, 2015, Inner Mongolia Yitai Coal Co., Ltd. released its semi-annual report for 2015. The announcement states that Inner Mongolia Yitai Coal-to-Oil Co., Ltd., in which the company holds a 51% stake, maintained a stable safety record during the first half of 2015, with no safety or environmental incidents occurring. The coal-to-oil plant operated safely and stably for 180.6 days, with 0.4 days of unplanned shutdowns. It produced 101,300 tons of various oils and chemical products, and sold the same amount of these products. The plant generated revenue of 463 million yuan and a net profit of 2.655 million yuan. In the first half of 2015, the average WTI oil price was 53 dollars per barrel, compared to 101 dollars per barrel during the same period last year. Correspondingly, Itai Coal-to-Oil Company’s operating revenue in the first half of 2015 also declined, from 636 million yuan in the same period last year to 463 million yuan. Yet even so, at a WTI oil price of $53 per barrel, the Yitai coal-to-oil demonstration plant, with a designed capacity of only 180,000 tons per year, can still be profitable! Yahua Consulting believes that the production costs of the million-ton-scale coal-to-oil plants under construction in China will **be lower than those of Yitai’s existing pilot plants. Moreover, as international oil prices recover to more reasonable levels in the future, the profitability of coal-to-oil production is set to increase significantly. In addition, coal-to-oil has the advantage of extremely low sulfur content, and when used as a blending component it helps ensure that automotive gasoline and diesel meet the requirement of a sulfur content of no more than 10 ppm as specified by Standard National V. The \"Work Plan for Strengthening Air Pollution Prevention and Control in the Energy Sector,\" jointly issued by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Environmental Protection in 2014, identified coal-to-oil as an important source of clean petroleum products, with a planned production volume of 10 million tons by 2017. http://www.chinacoalchem.com/news.asp?id=60409