Invista Texas adiponitrile plant undergoes maintenance

17 July 2009 22:48  [Source: ICIS news]

HOUSTON (ICIS news)--US chemicals producer Invista began new maintenance this week at its adiponitrile (ADN) plant in Texas, but said on Friday that it was still too early to say when the plant might be fully operational.

ADN capacity at the Orange plant is 240,000 tonnes/year. The site’s adipic acid capacity is 200,000 tonnes/year.

The unit has been off line since Hurricane Ike hit Texas in September.  However, the hexamethylene diamine (HMD) unit at the site was restarted in April.

“It would be premature for us to speculate on the exact timing of when the Orange site will return to full production, given the extent of the damage originally sustained as a result of Hurricane Ike,” a company spokesperson said.

According to a filing with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), the maintenance project was scheduled to be completed during the first week of August and would include the cleaning of vessels and some production units.

Invista is a major consumer of butadiene (BD), which the company uses to produce ADN. ADN is then used as a feedstock in the production of nylon 6,6.

On 9 July, Invista declared a global force majeure (FM) on its nylon 6,6, nylon salt, ADN and HMD after a series of events severely curtailed production.

Those events included a government allocation of natural gas supply in Berazategui, Argentina, operational issues in Victoria, Texas, and constricted supply from a BD supplier. Although the company said earlier this week that some of the issues had been resolved, it had not yet lifted supply constraints.

For more on Invista’s Orange, Texas, plant, visit ICIS plants and projects
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By: Larry Terry
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