India’s Haldia to restart cracker after outage

03 April 2008 10:11  [Source: ICIS news]

SINGAPORE (ICIS news)-India’s state run Haldia Petrochemicals Ltd (HPL) intends to restart its cracker soon after a five-day outage caused by technical difficulties, company sources said on Thursday.

HPL recently declared force majeure on its 75,000 tonne/year butadiene (BD) supply following the shutdown at the complex at Haldia, in West Bengal state, a company source said.

Two sources at India's second largest polyolefins producer denied market talk that the company declared force majeure on polyethylene (PE) and benzene, and that the company was meeting its contractual obligations to customers despite an outage at the cracker.

“The company shut down the complex on 30 March due to technical problems and hopes to restart operations by midnight of 3 April,” a company source said.

Benzene supply was affected by the outage and the company would stabilise supply by mid-April, another company source added.

The outage was caused by a problem in the gear box of the linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) extruder and sludge in the naphtha cracker heat exchanger from the water from the cooling tower, market sources said.

“As a result, the cooling was not proper and with summer already here, it was important for HPL to rectify the problem immediately,” a market source said.

The facilities at Haldia consist of a 520,000 tonne/year naphtha cracker, a 260,000 tonne/year high density PE (HDPE) unit, a 290,000 tonne/year linear low density PE (LLDPE) swing unit and a 110,000 tonne/year benzene unit.

For more on ethylene, BD, PE and benzene visit ICIS chemical intelligence. Helen Yan and Mahua Chakravarty contributed to this article

By: Prema Viswanathan
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