Japan's Refinery Woes Expose Fragile Crude Demand and Supplier Risk

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Japan’s top refiner, Eneos Corp, has reported an unplanned shutdown at its 77,000 bpd No.3 crude distillation unit (CDU) at the Kawasaki refinery near Tokyo. The outage began June 4 with no timeline given for a restart. While the scale of the disruption is relatively modest in global terms, the implications run far deeper. This is the latest in a string of outages for Eneos—one CDU was just brought back online in Mizushima after planned maintenance, while another in Sakai remains offline until July. But more critically, it reflects…