GPCA ‘09: Saudi Al Waha to restart PP plant in two weeks

09 December 2009 11:38  [Source: ICIS news]

DUBAI(ICIS news)--Saudi Arabia’s Al-Waha Petrochemical is expected to restart its 450,000 tonne/year polypropylene (PP) plant in Al Jubail “in the next two weeks” after an outage, a senior official with LyondellBasell, one of the company’s two joint venture partners, said on Wednesday.

The plant was shut down on 21 November due to technical problems and had been expected to restart on 7 December, a source close to Al Waha had told ICIS news last month.

“The cause of the unscheduled shutdown is a problem in the gearbox of the extruder,” said Just Jansz, president of LyondellBasell’s technology business, in an interview on the sidelines of the fourth Gulf Petrochemicals and Chemicals Association (GPCA) forum.

This was just a “teething problem” which would be resolved in a couple of weeks and he expected production at the plant to stabilise very soon, Jansz said.

The three-day forum ends on Thursday.

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By: Prema Viswanathan
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