Saudi Aramco responds to complaints on cement fuel shortage
The Sub-National Committee of Cement Companies of the Council of Saudi Chambers warned of a new crisis facing the cement industry due to fuel shortages experienced by companies in the Kingdom, Yalla Finance reports.
Saudi Aramco defended the amount of fuel it allocates to cement companies in the Kingdom, stating that the fuel allocated to these companies is enough to increase the production capacity of cement by 16 per cent. The company said the cement companies’ didn’t exploit available fuel supplies to produce 50Mt of cement per year, but only produced 42.3Mt of cement during the period from April of the last year to last March.
Aramco indicates that the ongoing supply of fuel in the Kingdom is based upon quantities agreed upon in advance of the sales agreements with these companies.
The response to these assertions came from a senior official in one of the local cement companies who expressed surprise at Aramco’s statistics and the data regarding the production capacity of cement plants. He said that the majority of these companies rely on knowledge of annual production capacity from the beginning of January to December of each year, indicating that cement companies stopped production lines after suffering from a cement surplus that reached 10Mt over the last year.
He added that there are production lines in many plants that have stopped until the disposal of surplus. Published under Cement News
