Taiwan’s Formosa aroms No3 shut on fire, checks ongoing

19 August 2009 04:51  [Source: ICIS news]

SINGAPORE (ICIS news)--Taiwan’s Formosa Chemical and Fibre Corp (FCFC) shut its No 3 aromatics line in Mailiao late last night following a fire that broke out, company sources said on Wednesday.

Investigations were ongoing and the incident was due to a fire at one of the plant’s utilities units as FCFC was trying to restart the aromatics line that had been shut since July , the source added. The shutdown period of the facility was unknown at the time of writing.

Another source close to the company said that the fire was due to overheating of the xylenes separation tower that happened around 20:00 hours local time on Tuesday. He added that there were no casualties as a result of the fire.

FCFC’s No 3 aromatics line can produce up to 700,000 tonnes/year of paraxylene (PX), 400,000 tonnes/year of benzene and 150,000 tonnes/year of orthoxylene (OX).

With additional reporting by Salmon Aidan Lee and Ong Sheau Ling

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By: Bohan Loh
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