Data from PBF Energy's Chalmette location. Photo: Orbital Insights
Orbital Insight launched its refinery outage product, a daily data feed that detects maintenance activity changes up to three days before existing reporting services. This product aims to help energy sector participants identify the start and finish of maintenance activity at nearly all U.S. refineries, providing supply production information days before this information is available through current reporting. This product has been developed over the past six months in consultation with energy traders, and complements Orbital Insight's existing multi-year global oil inventory tools.
Orbital Insight uses geolocation data to objectively identify relevant staffing changes at the refinery plant level and compares that to planned maintenance forecasts of refinery operators, which plan 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.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 percent of U.S. refining capacity.
"Now, traders, investors and analysts covering refineries will benefit from daily monitoring of planned and unplanned outages using objective observation-based data at the plant level that was not previously available," said Orbital Insight Chief Business Officer Kevin O'Brien. "While other companies provide lagged intel based on estimates or upon observation of units heating up, our data leverages an accurate measurement of staffing levels to fine-tune, and often detect previously unreported maintenance activity on a daily basis."