Saudi Aramco Ships Out Naphtha Cargoes Amid Jazan Reformer Outage: Sources — OPIS

Saudi Aramco has shipped out two medium range-sized naphtha tankers from the Red Sea following an outage at its Jazan reformer last week, multiple sources said on Thursday.

It remains unclear when the reformer will restart, but sources largely expect the shutdown to last only about two weeks. The reformer is part of a refining and industrial complex located in Jazan Economic City on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. The integrated refinery has a throughput of 400,000 b/d.

The outage will immediately reduce demand for naphtha and condensate, the feedstocks used by catalytic reformers to produce high-octane reformate, a gasoline-blending component, and aromatics such as benzene which serve as petrochemical feedstocks.

The 92 RON reforming spread, an indicator of naphtha-to-gasoline reformate conversion economics, has been rising steadily to $28 per metric ton as of Wednesday, thanks to the coming peak season for gasoline consumption, according to OPIS data.

The export move from the Jazan reformer comes at a time when a feedstock bottleneck still weighs on the Asian market, with most shipments remaining stranded inside the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of Asia's energy imports flow.

Supplies from alternative routes have ramped up since as buyers seek to avoid risks in the narrow waterway. According to Aramco's latest financial report released on Sunday, its east-west pipeline reached maximum capacity of 7 million barrels/day in the first quarter, supporting crude flows to the Red Sea coast.

This content was created by Oil Price Information Service, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. OPIS is run independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

--Reporting by Yiwen Ju, yju@opisnet.com; Editing by Mei-Hwen Wong, mwong@opisnet.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 14, 2026 06:25 ET (10:25 GMT)