Orbital Insight Introduces New Product to Monitor US. Refinery Activity

Service Will Provide Continuous Insight into over 85% of US. Refining Capacity

Orbital Insight announced the launch of its refinery outage product, a daily data feed that detects maintenance activity changes up to three days before existing reporting services. Energy sector participants, including investors, traders, analysts, and reporters, are now able to accurately identify the start and finish of maintenance activity at nearly all U.S. refineries, providing critical 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 leading energy traders and complements Orbital Insight’s existing multi-year global oil inventory tools to provide a comprehensive and timely view into global energy markets.

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.

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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% of U.S. refining capacity. Subscribers receive the data as a daily time series and can set up customized alert notifications of anomalous activity. This service allows customers to improve and refine the accuracy of supply-demand models. Orbital Insight’s refinery outage product cuts down on the latency of currently available information, biases in the information released by the operators themselves, and uses one methodology to ensure that reporting is consistent from plant to plant.

“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 Kevin O’Brien, Chief Business Officer at Orbital Insight. “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.”

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For example, Orbital Insight detected a sizeable spike in the number of mobile devices in the PBF Chalmette Refinery, located near New Orleans, from March to June 2018 corresponding to a turnaround that was absent in maintenance forecasts. News sources later confirmed a week after the fact that a flaring event on March 10, 2018, “was the result of an accident at the facility during a “turnaround” maintenance project, and was not reported in advance to the state.” Having this information sooner could help energy traders better understand the impact of unplanned maintenance activities, enabling them to make more timely and better-informed trading decisions.

Geolocation data offers nearly continuous snapshots of ground activity and represents a powerful addition to Orbital Insight’s already extensive datasets. Orbital Insight’s multi-source platform enables traders and analysts to derive insights from otherwise opaque performance and efficiency benchmarks to improve strategic decision making.

In accordance with our corporate ethics policy, Orbital Insight does not receive any PII (Personal Identification Information) from geolocation suppliers. Moreover, the aggregation of the data removes any pseudo-anonymous data, resulting in large quantities of unidentifiable pings. Orbital Insight only sources geolocation data from vendors who explicitly comply with our ethics policy and user opt-in processing for appropriate third-party use of their location data.

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