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Saudi Arabian refiner Saudi Aramco has offered its eighth cargo of straight-run fuel oil in a month, due to an outage at its Ras Tanura refinery, which has prevented it from processing the fuel oil as feedstock, according to market sources.

The latest parcel of straight-run A960 fuel oil has been offered by the state-owned oil company following a problem with its hydrocracker, which has been down since early March and is not due to restart until May.

The company has also offered its third cargo of 380-centistoke (cst) for export in the past month, due to testing of a new thermal cracking unit at the Red Sea town of Rabigh, a process which is said to be producing excess volumes of A962. The parcel is scheduled for loading on April 19-21, according to market sources.

The previous two cargoes are said to have been purchased by French oil company Total for loading on March 20-24 and April 5-7.

Total, Europe's largest refiner, has already said that it will cut production of fuel oil due to poor margins and demand. Overall, the company says it will close 10-20 percent of its overall 1.4 million barrels per day (bpd) of capacity at its eight refineries in France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco's eighth A960 cargo is scheduled for loading on May 10-12 and follows seven previous 80,000-tonne lots of the same grade with late-March to early-May loading dates.

Last year the state-run firm sold similar straight-run fuel oil cargoes during the month of February following an outage at the 44,000 barrels-per-day hydrocracker unit. Delays to the restart of the Ras Tanura hydrocracker in June 2007 also led to Aramco selling fuel oil cargoes for export.

The A960 cargoes are high-quality feedstocks used by Asian refineries to process fuel oil into higher-value products such as gas oil and naptha. Aramco normally tends to only offer this product to other companies when it is not able to utilize the fuel oil itself.

Four of Aramco's A960 parcels for late-March to early-April loading are said to have been bought by ConocoPhillips, Itochu, Vitol and an unknown refiner.

Total and Itochu are reported to have purchased their respective cargoes - for loading on Aptil 12-13 and 18-20 - at a premium of approximately $3 per tonne to Singapore spot quotes on a free-on-board (FOB) basis.