Operating rates of major Chinese refineries averaged 80.1% on Thursday, a slight fall of 0.32 percentage points from two weeks ago, ICIS C1 data showed.

The drop was mainly because of the turnaround at Qingdao Petrochemical's 5m tonne/year refinery, which pulled down the run rates in Shandong province by 10 percentage points.

Refinery operating rates in east China increased by 3 percentage points as Yangzi Petrochemical further raised crude throughput with turnarounds at some units complete.

Major refinery run rates are expected to rebound in September, because Jingmen Petrochemical and Maoming Petrochemical will restart some secondary processing units after turnarounds.

The above figures were obtained through computation on the basis of refineries' primary refining capacities. If calculated on the basis of their complex refining ratio, the average run rate is around 88% on Thursday, down by 0.36 percentage points from two weeks ago.

The refinery operating rate is an average of 35 major refineries that have a combined capacity of 363m tonnes/year, accounting for 72% of the total capacity of major refineries.