Sam Nam to keep No1 QTA idle, shut No4 in Dec

13 November 2008 15:57  [Source: ICIS news]

SINGAPORE (ICIS news)--South Korea’s Sam Nam Petrochemical planned to keep its No1 300,000 tonne/year qualified terephthalic acid (QTA) line at Yeocheon shut down until the end of the year and would likely shut down its No4 500,000 tonne/year unit at the same site for two weeks in December, a company source said.

“Due to market reasons, we’ll keep No1 down until the year of this year, maybe we’d restart it in January next year,” said the source.

The company shut down the No1 unit in October and planned for it to be idle until the end of November.

At the No4 unit, the company’s engineers have recommended “at least two weeks of down time” to correct a fault that, if left unrepaired, could eventually result in an outage, the source said.

“But we told [the engineers] that we’d probably need the volumes to fulfil December and January contracts, so the exact duration of the downtime would be fixed later,” said the source.

Sam Nam operates another 600,000 tonne/year QTA facility at Yeocheon and a 300,000 tonne/year purified terephthalic acid line adjacent to the QTA units.

The company has had several shutdowns this year due to the poor market for producers of the fibre intermediate.

Sam Nam is jointly owned by Japan’s Mitsubishi Chemical (40%) and South Korea’s Samyang Petrochemical (40%), with oil company GS-Caltex Oil owning the remaining 20%.

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By: Salmon Aidan Lee
+65 6780 4359

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