Australia's biggest fuel supplier Ampol Ltd <ALD.AX> said on Tuesday it planned to restart its Lytton oil refinery in September, four months after it was shut down in response to a hit to demand from the COVID-19 crisis.
The coronavirus-induced lockdown has hammered demand for gasoline, jet fuel, diesel and shipping fuel, pressuring refiners who had only recently returned to profitability after years of booking losses.
Ampol, formerly called Caltex Australia, said it would begin a phased restart of the refinery all through next month and expected it to reach full production capacity of 108,000 barrels per day by early October.
The company in April had brought forward and extended a planned outage of the Lytton refinery, one of Australia's four refineries, to limit the impact of crashing refining margins during the lockdown.
"Market conditions for refining continue to be highly uncertain and Ampol will continue to review its refining operations and provide routine updates of its refining performance once operations recommence," the company said in a statement.
(Reporting by Arpit Nayak in Bengaluru, Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips)
