Three Chinese PTA makers report brief outages

25 August 2009 13:13  [Source: ICIS news]

SINGAPORE (ICIS news)--Four terephthalic acid lines belonging to three Chinese companies were brought offline suddenly in recent days but have since restarted, company sources said on Tuesday.

BP Zhuhai’s two purified terephthalic acid (PTA) lines in the south of China, with a total nameplate capacity of 1.4m tonnes/year, were down briefly between Sunday and Monday on mechanical issues, said a company source.

“We’ve been told the plants had restarted as of Monday, and they’re operating normally now,” added the source.

Separately, Yisheng Dahua Petrochemical’s 1.5m tonne/year PTA facility at Dalian in the north of the country was down between Sunday and Tuesday due to a water leakage problem, said a company source.

“The problem was rectified, and now the plant’s been restarted,” added the source.

Finally, Zhejiang Yuan Dong Petrochemical was forced to shut its No1 600,000 tonne/year Eastman proprietary terephthalic acid (EPTA) line at Shaoxing in eastern China over the weekend.

EPTA is considered a less-pure form of PTA.

“We ran into some technical problems, we’d no choice but to shut [the EPTA line] briefly,” said a company source, who added that the line was restarted on Tuesday.

The line’s outage did not affect the operations of two 600,000 tonne/year PTA units at the Shaoxing site, said the source.

BP, Yisheng and Yuan Dong are some of the biggest suppliers of the fibre intermediate in China. Other Chinese PTA producers include Sinopec, Xiang Lu Petrochemical and Ningbo Mitsubishi Chemical.

Freya Tang of CBI China contributed to this article
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By: Salmon Aidan Lee
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