Iran producers eye restart after cracker outage

10 January 2008 10:41  [Source: ICIS news]

SINGAPORE (ICIS news)--Iran’s Marun Petrochemical and Amir Kabir Petrochemical expect to restart their crackers and derivative units next week, following an outage at a centralised utilities facility near the plants at Bandar Imam, a source close to the companies said on Thursday.

Output of ethylene, propylene, polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP) and monoethylene glycol (MEG) would be severely curtailed due to the shutdowns, sources said.

“Both the companies were forced to shut down their plants two weeks ago due to technical problems at the centralised utilities units,” the first source said.

According to a second source, the utilities units were shut down because of a heavy snowstorm.

The severe weather was said to have resulted in the diversion of gas feedstocks from the crackers for heating purposes, market sources said, but this could not be confirmed.

“Most of Marun’s inventory of MEG has been used up to meet customer commitments in January, so there will be very little availability in February,” a second source said.

Domestic supply of PE and PP would also be reduced, the first source said.

A significant portion of Iran’s production of PE and PP is now being directed at the domestic market, as imports into the country have been hit by US sanctions on the country’s three main state banks.

Ethylene from Marun’s 1.1m tonne/year cracker at Bandar Imam is fed downstream to a 300,000 tonne/year high density PE (HDPE) plant and a 400,000 tonne/year MEG plant.

Amir Kabir’s 520,000 tonne/year cracker operates a 300,000 tonne/year HDPE/linear low density PE (LLDPE) swing plant at Bandar Imam. It also runs a 160,000 tonne/year PP plant.

Marun and Amir Kabir are subsidiaries of Iran’s state-owned National Petrochemical Co (NPC).

Steve Tan and Salmon Aidan Lee contributed to this article

By: Prema Viswanathan
+65 6780 4359

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