Japan's oil demand to rise on nuclear outages - IEA
Date: 14-Oct-02
Country: UK
The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that Japan's residual fuel oil demand was expected to rebound by about 11 percent in the fourth quarter, given the unscheduled shutdown of more than 10 percent of its nuclear capacity in September.
Japanese utilities were expected to boost their use of residual fuel oil and direct burn of crude oil to make up for the nuclear loss, following a crisis of confidence over nuclear safety.
"Neither coal-fired units nor operational nuclear units can make up the unscheduled loss of nuclear capacity," the IEA said in its report.
"This report estimates that incremental oil demand will reach a total of roughly 75,000 bpd in October, 105,000 bpd in November and 80,000 bpd in December," it said, classifying all the incremental demand as residual fuel oil.
Japan's Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc (TEPCO) admitted in late August it had hidden the existence of cracks at several of its nuclear reactors, partly by falsifying data on safety checks.
Since then several other power firms have also said they failed to report cracks at their nuclear reactors.
Resource-poor Japan relies on nuclear power for around one-third of its power supply.
