Venezuela’s olefins unit down for maintenance

25 August 2008 23:06  [Source: ICIS news]

HOUSTON (ICIS news)--One of two olefins units in Venezuela is down for maintenance due to technical problems, a source with local producer Pequiven said on Monday.

Unit two, with 600 tonnes/day ethylene production capacity, was stopped about 10 days ago and is now expected to resume operations within the next 5-10 days, the source said.

The incident has forced the local producer to look for imported material in international markets, and this had an impact on domestic polypropylene prices, which went up by 17% in mid-August.

Pequiven is committed to keeping the domestic market supplied and must maintain a single price for domestic and imported material, the source said. The unexpected outage increased costs due to additional propylene imports.

With internal demand growing rapidly, monomer and polymer imports are likely to represent a larger portion of the total Venezuelan demand in coming years until new projects spearheaded by Braskem and Pequiven increase domestic production, the source said.

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By: George Martin
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