Australia's January LPG exports of more than 244,000t rose by 44.7pc from a year earlier but were around 14pc below December shipments, with the year-on-year rise underpinned by butane exports at a four-month high, according to the latest official trade data.
January butane shipments of around 136,000t almost doubled from a year earlier and were up by 2.5pc from December, according to January trade data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) processed by GTT. There was no breakdown by export destination for the latest butane data.
Propane shipments were not so robust, falling by 28pc on the month but rising by 8.5pc from a year earlier to around 108,000t in January, the ABS data showed.
The Shell-operated 3.6mn t/yr Prelude floating LNG facility in the Browse basin offshore Western Australia restarted in January after spending most of 2020 off line because of technical issues. Prelude has capacity to produce 400,000 t/yr of LPG.
The average export price for combined shipments of propane, butane and LPG was $544.73/t in January, up by 26.5pc from an average of $430.34/t in December and above the $500.39/t average export price for January 2020. The January export price was the highest monthly average since the $638.39/t achieved in October 2018.
The average export price for January was based on a US-Australian dollar exchange rate of $0.7726, and was the highest value for the Australian dollar against the US dollar since March 2018 when it averaged $0.7766.
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